We are pleased and excited about our just-published coedited book, The New Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies. In our introduction (available in full on the Cambridge University Press book page), we discuss the exigence and shape of our book. Here’s a few excerpts from that introduction, which we hope will entice you to read the introduction and book in its entirety:
For at least the past 100 years, Americanist literary criticism has emphasized the new, in part because the academic study of American literature was new in the first few decades of the twentieth century. The British novelist D. H. Lawrence, who could lay claim to be one of the founders of US literary studies, used the word “new” over 125 times in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), asserting right from the start of his lively discussion of figures who had previously been ignored or viewed as children’s writers: “There is a new voice in the old American classics. The world has declined to hear it, and has blabbed about children’s stories.” Lawrence’s book went hand in hand with a key development in US universities: the move from philological to a more nation-based literary study that allowed for the introduction, during the 1920s and 1930s, of courses in American literature, and even the creation of a scholarly journal—American Literature—which started up in 1929. In the spirit of Lawrence, the journal emphasized the newness—the essential difference—of American literature with respect to British and other European literatures.
As many have noted, F. O. Matthiessen’s seminal 1941 American Renaissance had virtually nothing to say about women and minority writers. In response to Matthiessen and other foundational Americanists like R. W. B. Lewis and Henry Nash Smith, another “new” American literature began to emerge during the 1970s and 1980s in response to the Civil Rights and Black Arts Movements and such feminist recovery projects as the Rutgers American Women Writers series. A more multicultural and feminist American literary canon was codified with the publication of the first edition of The Heath Anthology of American Literature (1989). Around this time the New Historicism of the 1980s, with its Michel Foucault-inspired emphasis on the implication of literature in cultural formations of power inspired a major movement in American literary studies of the 1990s: the “New Americanists.” Spearheaded by Donald E. Pease, who had a book series of that name at Duke University Press, the New Americanists in books and journal articles focused on literature’s implications in such cultural formations as Manifest Destiny, racial capitalism, and imperialism. All the while it is worth remembering, as Susan Gillman noted, that invocations of the “new” often can align with the exceptionalist thinking that facilitates the imaginaries of empire.
We begin with a brief overview of the “new” in order to assert what our book is not. The New Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies does not offer a single or collective vision of a new American literature studies for our present moment. Instead, it does something that we believe is more useful for scholars and teachers working in the field of nineteenth-century US literary studies: take stock of critical developments over the past twenty years and, in eclectic fashion, present a wide range of new approaches, some of which draw on the “old,” such as Claudia Stokes’s essay on Washington Irving and the sketch tradition, and some on the “new” that is not so new anymore. What we can say about the New Americanists and other developments in the field of the late twentieth century is that these critical and intellectual formations presented themselves as something of a rupture or break with older models of scholarship that were seen to be too tightly held in thrall to the purities of the text, the straightforwardness of chronology, or the presumed coherence of individual identity. Inevitably, the sheen of a new approach dulls over time and newer models of Americanist criticism, not unlike consumer goods everywhere, for a while take their place. Just as surely, though, the familiarization of the new speaks to the widespread adoption and utility of these methodological perspectives. The “oppositional common sense” that Pease claimed for the New Americanists has become simply common sense, at least in some critical circles.
Mindful of these lessons, The New Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies is presented not so much as a rejection of established critical tendencies, although there are in these pages healthy doses of the impulse to move beyond the usual ways of talking about data, race, the environment, religion, and Indigeneity. It is rather an occasion to assess the various developments that have transformed the field of nineteenth-century American literary studies over the past two decades, including work in such areas as print and material culture, Black studies, Latinx studies, disability studies, gender and sexuality studies, postsecular studies, and Indigenous studies. But this book does more than take stock of where we are right now as nineteenth-century Americanists. We asked our contributors to take the occasion of their chapters not only to offer bibliographical guidance but also to map out new directions for the future of the field. Many of the contributors in the volume work with case studies—a key literary work or two—that help both to bring critical debate into focus and model fresh interpretive approaches.
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