Predicting the Past

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.

Winnifred Eaton

Winnifred Eaton Babcock Reeve (b. 1875–d. 1954) was a Chinese North American author best known for fiction published under the faux-Japanese penname “Onoto Watanna.” In her forty-year career, Eaton published nineteen novels, many of which were critically acclaimed and translated into many languages. Eaton also published hundreds of stories, poems, and articles in US, Canadian, Jamaican, and English magazines and newspapers. She was born in Montreal to a white British father and a Chinese mother who married in China and, after brief stays in England and the United States, emigrated to Canada. Whereas Winnifred pretended to be Japanese, Eaton’s older sister Edith wrote sympathetically about diasporic Chinese using the pen name “Sui Sin Far”; with her sister Sara, Winnifred co-wrote Chinese-Japanese Cook Book (1914), one of the first Asian American cookbooks. Sara’s experiences also inspired Winnifred Eaton’s novel Marion (1916). In 1895, Eaton began her writing career working as a reporter in Jamaica. Soon afterward, she moved to Cincinnati, where she first assumed the identity of a half-Japanese, and then to Chicago. Writing as “Onoto Watanna,” Eaton published prolifically about Japanese life, exploring romantic encounters between Americans and Japanese and the experiences of mixed-race children and interracial kinship. Her Miss Numè of Japan (1898) is the first novel in English by a writer of Asian descent published in North America. In 1901, when she was living in New York, Eaton married journalist Bertrand Babcock and published her novel A Japanese Nightingale, which skyrocketed her to fame, inspiring a play, a film, and an opera. After reviewers expressed doubts about her Japanese identity, however, Eaton tried to leave Japanese subjects behind her. She submitted Diary of Delia (1907) to publishers under another pseudonym, published Me (1915) and Marion (1916) anonymously, and published one final Japanese-themed text, Sunny-San, in 1922. In 1917, after divorcing Babcock, Eaton married American businessman Francis Reeve, moved to Alberta, and rebranded herself as “Winnifred Reeve,” rancher’s wife and Canadian literary nationalist. There, Eaton wrote Cattle, a powerful naturalist novel about a girl raped by her employer, and His Royal Nibs, a romance between an English aristocrat and a young Alberta woman, and tried her hand at writing screenplays. Eaton received her first film credit in 1921 on Universal’s “False Kisses.” When the Reeves’ ranch failed, Eaton joined the East Coast scenario department of Universal, a then-minor film producer, and soon afterward was made its Hollywood editor-in-chief and literary advisor. Eaton collaborated on dozens of screenplays and adaptations, translating her experience writing Japanese romances into scripts featuring exotic locales and peoples, as well as commissioned scripts during Universal’s transition from “silents” to “talkies”. She also ghostwrote scripts for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Eaton left Hollywood and returned to Alberta in 1931 after a brief estrangement from Reeve. At her death, most of Eaton’s works were out of print. Yet she remains significant to North American literary history as the first Asian American novelist and screenwriter and as an early Canadian author and woman journalist.

The Cambridge Companion to Early American Literature

This Companion covers American literary history from European colonization to the early republic. It provides a succinct introduction to the major themes and concepts in the field of early American literature, including new world migration, indigenous encounters, religious and secular histories, and the emergence of American literary genres. This book guides readers through important conceptual and theoretical issues, while also grounding these issues in close readings of key literary texts from early America.

The Object of Jewish American Literary History

This essay explores assumptions underwriting literary categorization, focusing on Jewish American literary history in particular (mostly), and considers the scalar logic that allows us to link the singular text, with all of its luminous possibility, with the particular world of a given literary category. The essay’s first section critiques major claims about Jewish American literary history made over the last 20 years by observing the persistently underexamined use of a metaphorical and metaphysical concept of identity, and then lays out problems with scaling up between select texts and the larger category of a given field of literature. Problems of scale in Jewish American literary history are highlighted by comparison with recent critiques of African American literary history. Scale itself harbors problems of commensurability insofar as scaling between a single object and a set to which the object belongs requires acts of comparison which leap over differences of kind, a problem explored in the essay’s second section through analogies with problems of commensurability in the discipline of physics. The third section locates those problems of commensurability in Nicole Krauss’s novel Forest Dark (2017) and reads that novel’s direct confrontation with literary history as exemplifying how literary scholars can foreground multiplicity and possibility, precisely through the foregrounding of their own situated practice as interested agents. Rather than reproduce that figment by projecting a historically continuous and recognizable Jewishness across two centuries of literature, Jewish American literary studies should ally and coordinate itself with the field-questioning work occurring among Black and Latinx studies scholars who substantiate the salience of their field’s identity-based study, even as they depart from its historical formation.

Edwards’s Place and Importance in Anglo-American Literature

Long recognized as foundational contributions to British American belles lettres, the works of Jonathan Edwards influenced later writers and shaped narratives of American literary history. Edwards appears in the first descriptions of early American literature, and he continues to figure prominently in anthologies and histories of American writing today. This essay emphasizes major authors—from Harriet Beecher Stowe and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., to Robert Lowell, to Marilynne Robinson—who have acknowledged his influence. The nature of that influence varies, for every generation creates a distinctive version of Edwards. Advancing a liberal vision of Christianity, Stowe and Holmes reacted against Edwards’s alleged theological rigidity and spiritual cruelty. Lowell wrote poems reflecting the Edwardsean revival of the mid-twentieth century and bearing the imprint of the New Criticism. And in recent years, Robinson has staked a claim as a latter-day Edwardsean, embracing his intellectual legacy as an inspiration and resource for her celebrated novels.

Spending Time in the Nineteenth Century

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.