The New Early American Anthology

Abstract

The New Early American Anthology Philip Gould (bio) Early American Writings. Edited by Carla Mulford, Angela Vietto, and Amy E. Winans. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. xxii + 1129 pp. The Literatures of Colonial America: An Anthology. Edited by Susan Castillo and Ivy Schweitzer. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. xxii +602 pp. The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature: A Reader of Original Texts with English Translations. Edited by Marc Shell and Werner Sollors. New York: New York University Press, 2000. xiii + 750 pp. Writing New England: An Anthology from the Puritans to the Present. Edited by Andrew Delbanco. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001. xlvi + 463 pp. The beginning of Robert Spiller's Literary History of the United States (1948) makes a rather bold statement about the cultural politics of literary criticism: "Each generation should produce at least one literary history of the United States, for each generation must define the past in its own terms" (vii). This is pretty ironic, I think, because Spiller has been one of the major villains for New Americanists and multiculturalists alike, possibly the worst example of postwar American exceptionalism. But his declaration actually does capture the revisionist élan of the literary anthologies under review (with the exception of Writing New England). In particular, Early American Writings and The Literatures of Colonial America model a new kind of early American studies that reads beyond the U.S. nation and [End Page 305] change the field's object of study. Along with The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature, they provide a more complex mosaic of early American writing. But they also raise fundamental questions about such critical issues as the nature of translation, the meaning of textuality, and the potential of—and limits to—our professional expertise. I want to begin retrospectively in order to put two important interpretive categories these anthologies address—"American" and "literature" —into some sort of historical perspective. The practice of anthologizing American literature has a long history, which generally reveals the pressures immediate political and cultural ideologies have exerted on the formations and re-formations of the American canon. Collections of American literary works date back at least to the eighteenth century. They were commensurate with and propelled by the gradual development of the category of "literary culture" (see Shields), and, after the American Revolution, served the larger purposes of literary and cultural nationalism. Elihu Hubbard Smith's American Poems, Selected and Original (1793), for example, comes to mind. During the early nineteenth century and the antebellum period, several gradual developments—the professionalization of authorship, the democratization of American politics, and the capitalization of the literary market—led to the proliferation of American literary anthologies and histories. Notwithstanding their national bias and their lack of scholarly professionalism, works such as Samuel Knapp's Lectures on American Literature (1829), Rufus Griswold's The Poets and Poetry of America (1842) and Prose Writers of America (1847), and Evert and George Duyckinck's Cyclopaedia of American Literature (1855) made serious attempts to collect colonial and national writings as a way of establishing the viability of American letters. After the Civil War, as the study of literature became increasingly professionalized and associated with academic institutions, literary histories and anthologies continued to sustain the basic plot of the development of a national literature, though they showed increasing skepticism about the patriotic cant of their predecessors. Works like Moses Coit Tyler's History of American Literature (1878) and Literary History of the American Revolution, 1763–1783 (1897) also were more attuned to the importance of Anglo-Saxon cultural and historical connections between the United States and Great Britain (see Jones). This was especially true during the First World War when international politics amplified the importance of Anglo-American [End Page 306] cultural politics. The Cambridge History of American Literature (1917), for example, took Samuel Knapp to task for his "patriotic overture" (iii), and Barrett Wendell's Literary History of the United States (1900) made the case for the ongoing importance of Anglo-American cultural ties. "A literary history of America . . . should concern itself . . . with what America has contributed to the literature of the English language" (6). This challenge to the very definition of "American" itself came under attack...

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