Predicting the Past

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Boyden
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Niklas Luhmann ◽  
Modern Problem ◽  
Professional Discipline ◽  
The Past ◽  
Mary Douglas ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Histories

Drawing from the social theories of Niklas Luhmann and Mary Douglas, Predicting the Past advocates a reflexive understanding of the paradoxical institutional dynamic of American literary history as a professional discipline and field of study. Contrary to most disciplinary accounts, Michael Boyden resists the utopian impulse to offer supposedly definitive solutions for the legitimation crises besetting American literature studies by “going beyond” its inherited racist, classist, and sexist underpinnings. Approaching the existence of the American literary tradition as a typically modern problem generating diverse but functionally equivalent solutions, Boyden argues how its peculiarity does not, as is often supposed, reside in its restrictive exclusivity but rather in its massive inclusivity which drives it to constantly revert to a self-negating “beyond” perspective. Predicting the Past covers a broad range of both well-known and lesser known literary histories and reference works, from Rufus Griswold’s 1847 Prose Writers of America to Sacvan Bercovitch’s monumental Cambridge History of American Literature. Throughout, Boyden focuses on particular themes and topics illustrating the selfinduced complexity of American literary history such as the early “Anglocentric” roots theories of American literature; the debate on contemporary authors in the age of naturalism; the plurilingual ethnocentrism of the pioneer Americanists of the mid-twentieth century; and the genealogical misrepresentation of founding figures such as Jonathan Edwards, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Lowell.

Corruption and Redemption: The Legend of Valluvar and Tamil Literary History

2000 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 449-482 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Blackburn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Language Ideologies ◽  
Cultural Identities ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
History Of Literature

This [the Valluvar legend] is one of the traditions which are so repugnant to inveterate popular prejudice that they appear too strange for fiction, and are probably founded on fact. (Robert Caldwell 1875:132).If we now recognize that literary history is more than a history of literature, it is perhaps less widely accepted that the writing of literary history is an important subject for literary historiography. Yet literary histories are a rich source for understanding local conceptions of both history and literature. More accessible than archaeology, more tangible than ethnology, literary histories are culturally constructed narratives in which the past is reimagined in the light of contemporary concerns. Certainly in nineteenth-century India, the focus of this essay, literary history was seized upon as evidence to be advanced in the major debates of the time; cultural identities, language ideologies, civilization hierarchies and nationalism were all asserted and challenged through literary histories in colonial India. Asserted and challenged by Europeans, as well as Indians.

Writing American Literary History Sacvan Bercovitch (ed.), The Cambridge History of American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994–2005, £495.00). Volume One: 1590–1820 (1994, £70.00). Pp. xiii+829. ISBN 0 521 30105 [squf ]. Volume Two: Prose Writing, 1820–1865 (1995, £75.00). Pp. xviii+887. ISBN 0 521 30106 8. Volume Three: Prose Writing, 1860–1920 (2005, £80.00). Pp. xi+813. ISBN 0 521 30107 6. Volume Four: Nineteenth-Century Poetry, 1800–1910 (2004, £75.00). Pp. x+562. ISBN 0 521 30108 4. Volume Five: Poetry and Criticism, 1900–1950 (2003, £75.00). Pp. xi+624. ISBN 0 521 30109 2. Volume Six: Prose Writing, 1910–1950 (2002, £70.00). Pp. xx+620. ISBN 0 521 49731 0. Volume Seven: Prose Writing, 1940–1990 (1999, £75.00). Pp. xxiii+795. ISBN 0 521 49732 9. Volume Eight: Poetry and Criticism, 1940–1995 (1996, £75.00). Pp. viii+545. ISBN 0 521 49733 7.

2006 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 399-411
Author(s):  
RICHARD GRAY
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Century Poetry ◽  
And Gender ◽  
A Site

Each generation needs to rewrite literary history. And it may be that this generation needs to do it more than most, if only because the proliferation of schools and theories has turned what was once common critical ground into a battlefield. American books, among others, have become a site of struggle, and American writers have been among those caught in the criss-crossing searchlights of ethnic and gender studies, interdisciplinary investigations and studies of popular culture, language and communication. Just how far things have gone can be measured by the fact that every term in the phrase “history of American literature,” is now open to debate. The textuality of history and the historicity of the text have become the most contentious issues in contemporary criticism, while the question of nationhood, in particular, is under scrutiny. In a famous phrase, Walt Whitman described his work as a language experiment, an attempt to summon a nation into being through words. The slippery, plural nature of American identity and the bewildering contingencies of American history that drove Whitman to say this feed into the more challenging of the recent accounts of American writing.

“It Is Difficult to Disengage a Single Thread from the Living Web of a Nation’s Literature”

2018 ◽  
pp. 27-55
Author(s):  
Karin L. Hooks
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Women Writers ◽  
Literary Politics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Anthologies ◽  
Literary Histories

Arguing that the changing and more consolidated literary politics of the century’s turn helped make possible the canon wars of the twentieth century, this paper investigates the history of literary histories. Twentieth-century constructs of the field overlook an awareness that late-nineteenth century female literary historians envisioned in terms of a more inclusive and democratic American literary canon. Recovering a literary history largely erased by the turn into the twentieth century through a case study of Sarah Piatt’s career, this chapter focuses on two female literary historians of the 1890s: Ellen Mackay Hutchinson and Jeanette Gilder, whose literary anthologies include Piatt’s writing, unlike those of the following century. Hutchinson, who (with Edmund Clarence Stedman) edited a sizeable collection of American texts, the eleven-volume Library of American Literature, and Jeanette Gilder, co-editor of The Critic, who hosted a popular election to identify the top 125 American women writers of 1890, made arguments for the inclusion of Piatt in the canon that are worth revisiting in light of turn-of-the-century mechanisms for erasing the literary history of which Piatt was a part.

Recovering Chicano/a Literary Histories: Historiography beyond Borders

PMLA ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 120 (3) ◽  
pp. 796-805 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuel M. Martín-Rodríguez
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Mexican Americans ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Regional Studies ◽  
Latin Americans ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
The One

This article underscores the need to reconstruct Mexican American literary historiography by locating and analyzing pre–Chicano/a movement critical sources. Consideration of how Mexican Americans saw their literature at different junctures in the past will ensure that we do not impose our own aesthetic and political criteria as we reinterpret older texts. I analyze a 1959 literary history of New Mexico and Colorado in order to explore how a recovery of this particular text would intervene in current debates in the field of Chicana/o studies, most prominently the tension between nationalism and regional studies, on the one hand, and transnationalism, on the other. My analysis demonstrates that Mexican Americans and Chicanos/as have shared literary tastes and cultural capital with other Latinas/os and Latin Americans and that consequently Chicano/a literary history should be a discipline that goes beyond borders.

John Nichol, American Literature, and Scottish Liberalism

1963 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 20-30
Author(s):  
Andrew Hook
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Do So ◽  
Historical Sketch

The first history of American literature by a British author, John Nichol's American Literature, An Historical Sketch, 1620–1880, was published in Edinburgh in 1882. In several ways the publication was an unlikely event. By 1882 few American scholars had devoted themselves to the study of American literary history. For a British one to do so at that date must have struck most of his contemporaries as scarcely comprehensible. In 1866 Henry Yates Thompson of Liverpool had offered to endow a lectureship at Cambridge in the ‘History, Literature, and Institutions of the United States’—the lecturer to be appointed by the President and Fellows of Harvard. But for a combination of ecclesiastical, political, and academic reasons the offer was rejected as a dangerous novelty. Nothing had happened to make the ‘dangerous novelty’ of 1866 a respectable subject of academic concern in 1882.

scholarly journals Spending Time in the Nineteenth Century

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rieke Jordan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Access Point ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Free Time ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Nineteenth Century American Literature ◽  
Cultural Aspects ◽  
American Literary History

This special issue of New American Studies Journal: A Forum looks at nineteenth-century American literature and culture through the analytical lens of free time and leisure. This analytical framework affords a novel access point to American literary history—free time, as this special issue will explore, is a highly contested and politicized concept and resource of the nineteenth century, one that restructures temporalities and spaces. Nineteenth-century American culture and literature can be understood as an archive to explore free time as a significant social and economic innovation into the texture of individual life. The contributions to this special issue explore the rise of free time in the nineteenth century with particular attention toward temporal and spatial reconfigurations that free time afforded. Furthermore they explore the societal and cultural aspects of free time that grew around the logics and logistics of nineteenth-century capitalism—a social formation that made leisure, time off work, not merely possible, but that created entire industries and spaces for leisure and repose.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Lowney
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
Black Music ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Jazz History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Long Civil Rights Movement

There have been a number of outstanding studies that articulate the importance of black music for “Afro-modernist” literary production since Paul Gilroy’s seminal The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). Through inquiry into influential Marxist, Black Atlantic, and African diasporic studies of jazz literature and jazz history, the introduction explains how Jazz Internationalism is distinguished by its historical scope and attention to multiple genres of jazz literature. This introduction outlines not only a history of Afro-modernist jazz literature that corresponds with the Long Civil Rights Movement, it also underscores the intertextuality of jazz literature as it evolves through several generations of black music and writing. While the primary purpose of Jazz Internationalism is not one of recovering obscure writers or texts, it does make the case for a more expansive understanding of jazz writing for both African American literary history and African diasporic studies more generally.

Literary History on the Road: Transatlantic Crossings and Transpacific Crossovers

PMLA ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 119 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takayuki Tatsumi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War I ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Jazz Age ◽  
The Road ◽  
History Of ◽  
On The Road

Literary history has always mirrored discursive revolutions in world history. In the United States, the Jazz Age would not have seen the Herman Melville revival and the completion of Carl Van Doren's The Cambridge History of American Literature (1917–21) without the rise of post–World War I nativism. If it had not been for Pearl Harbor, F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance (1941) could not have fully aroused the democratic spirit embedded in the heritage of New Criticism. Likewise, the postcolonial and New Americanist climate around 1990, that critical transition at the end of the cold war, brought about the publication of Emory Elliott's The Columbia Literary History of the United States (1988) and Sacvan Bercovitch's The Cambridge History of American Literature (1994–). I would like to question, however, the discourse that narrates American literary history in the globalist age of the twenty-first century.

The Orchard of Syon: An Introduction

Traditio ◽  
1958 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 269-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sister Mary Denise
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Medieval Literature ◽  
Devotional Literature ◽  
Critical Research ◽  
The Past ◽  
Spiritual Climate ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

By some inexplicable accident of literary history, The Orchard of Syon, in the nearly five hundred years of its existence, has not found its critical editor, nor is there any study of it available to readers. The first to rescue it from oblivion was Sir Richard Sutton, steward of Syon Monastery in the early sixteenth century, who, as Wynkyn de Worde informs us, found it ‘in a corner by it selfe’ and deemed it worthy of costly publication. Although it belongs to a body of medieval literature which has been in recent years the object of much critical research by medievalists, the work has, so far as modern readers are concerned, continued for over four centuries to lie ‘in a corner by it selfe.’ The energetic surge of vernacular devotional prose in the fourteenth century, not only in England, but in Italy, Germany, and Flanders — countries whose spiritual climate must have been especially favorable to mysticism — did not recede in the fifteenth century. Following upon the age of Chaucer, this century may seem to some present-day scholars literarily poor and unproductive, but it was a great age of English prose; an age, that is, when translations and experiments with original prose in the vernacular were building on the past, borrowing from other languages to meet the needs of the present, and shaping the prose of the future. The Orchard of Syon is an important specimen of this emerging prose, as well as of current devotional literature. Its connection with Syon Monastery, renowned in the history of England and of the Church, gives it added prestige.

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