This article takes the distinctive publishing history of William Williams’s Robinsonade novel Mr. Penrose as a prompt to challenge conventional assumptions about the temporal logic of textual recovery. Scholars typically make a case for the value of forgotten or neglected texts by emphasizing forms of “creative anachronism” in which an author is said to be ahead of their time in ways only recognizable by posterity. Mr. Penrose, written in America in 1776, published in a heavily redacted version in Britain in 1815, and finally published in full in 1969, offers a means of apprehending the far less familiar dynamics of “pathetic anachronism,” wherein a text repeatedly fails to connect with the successive historical moments of its appearance and remains uncanonized. This stalled trajectory of Williams’s novel helps to illuminate the limitations of conventional discourses of textual recovery by tracing them back to tropes of the “found manuscript” and transatlantic shifts in genre popularity in the eighteenth century, as well as Romantic theories of temporal disjunction and the emergence of the historical novel in the nineteenth century and models of textual editing and debates over “the first American novel” in the twentieth century.These three versions of Williams’s novel . . . help us to see how various intellectual, aesthetic, generic, and material factors can mitigate against a text fitting into the mechanisms critics typically deploy to advance the positive qualities of anachronism.
{"title":"William Williams, Anachronism, and the Temporal Logic of Textual Recovery (1776/1815/1969)","authors":"Matthew Pethers","doi":"10.1093/alh/ajad230","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajad230","url":null,"abstract":"This article takes the distinctive publishing history of William Williams’s Robinsonade novel Mr. Penrose as a prompt to challenge conventional assumptions about the temporal logic of textual recovery. Scholars typically make a case for the value of forgotten or neglected texts by emphasizing forms of “creative anachronism” in which an author is said to be ahead of their time in ways only recognizable by posterity. Mr. Penrose, written in America in 1776, published in a heavily redacted version in Britain in 1815, and finally published in full in 1969, offers a means of apprehending the far less familiar dynamics of “pathetic anachronism,” wherein a text repeatedly fails to connect with the successive historical moments of its appearance and remains uncanonized. This stalled trajectory of Williams’s novel helps to illuminate the limitations of conventional discourses of textual recovery by tracing them back to tropes of the “found manuscript” and transatlantic shifts in genre popularity in the eighteenth century, as well as Romantic theories of temporal disjunction and the emergence of the historical novel in the nineteenth century and models of textual editing and debates over “the first American novel” in the twentieth century.These three versions of Williams’s novel . . . help us to see how various intellectual, aesthetic, generic, and material factors can mitigate against a text fitting into the mechanisms critics typically deploy to advance the positive qualities of anachronism.","PeriodicalId":45821,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139926287","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Rejections are a given in any poet’s career. This essay considers how rejections and the idea of the unpublished fragment might shape poetic form, how practical decisions might turn into aesthetic ones. Both Hart Crane and Jack Spicer had careers among magazines, the experiments of their writing entwined with ephemeral publishing cultures and communities. This essay explores how, through their own distinct experiments with splintered forms of the long poem, magazine rejections also created opportunities in Crane’s and Spicer’s poetry. Both poets turned practical processes into aesthetic experiments, exploring the states between writing, submission, publication, and acceptance or rejection.Yet practical decisions can turn into aesthetic ones. Indeed, the playful tension between practicality and aesthetics sits at the heart of poetic form. Crane and Spicer both incorporated rejections—unpublished poems or poems waiting on publication through various submissions—into the form of their work.
{"title":"Unpublishing as Form: Hart Crane, Jack Spicer, and the Thresholds of Periodical Publication","authors":"Francesca Bratton","doi":"10.1093/alh/ajad225","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajad225","url":null,"abstract":"Rejections are a given in any poet’s career. This essay considers how rejections and the idea of the unpublished fragment might shape poetic form, how practical decisions might turn into aesthetic ones. Both Hart Crane and Jack Spicer had careers among magazines, the experiments of their writing entwined with ephemeral publishing cultures and communities. This essay explores how, through their own distinct experiments with splintered forms of the long poem, magazine rejections also created opportunities in Crane’s and Spicer’s poetry. Both poets turned practical processes into aesthetic experiments, exploring the states between writing, submission, publication, and acceptance or rejection.Yet practical decisions can turn into aesthetic ones. Indeed, the playful tension between practicality and aesthetics sits at the heart of poetic form. Crane and Spicer both incorporated rejections—unpublished poems or poems waiting on publication through various submissions—into the form of their work.","PeriodicalId":45821,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139926286","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This short essay considers the cultural and historical context of Lionel Trilling’s unfinished, unpublished novel in response to Michael Kalisch’s essay for this issue. Written in the 1940s, The Journey Abandoned (editor’s title) reprises Trilling’s preoccupations in The Liberal Imagination with anti-Stalinist liberalism and Cold War modernism and emphasizes the importance of American literature to Trilling at the beginning of his career as both a critic and a novelist. Trilling championed those writers—and created fictional characters—whose thinking affirmed and resisted the status quo. The dynamism of dialectical thinking that enlivened his essays also echoed the pluralist model of consensus liberalism, in which multitude conflicts were in continual negotiation. In concluding, the essay suggests that the unfinished novel, perpetually open to interpretation, is an apt tribute to Trilling’s signature mode of thought.Ambitious and having to make his way professionally (he had just become an assistant professor in 1939), Trilling saw American literature as a vehicle of upward mobility for himself, just as it was for Vincent.
{"title":"Trilling Redux","authors":"Geraldine Murphy","doi":"10.1093/alh/ajad235","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajad235","url":null,"abstract":"This short essay considers the cultural and historical context of Lionel Trilling’s unfinished, unpublished novel in response to Michael Kalisch’s essay for this issue. Written in the 1940s, The Journey Abandoned (editor’s title) reprises Trilling’s preoccupations in The Liberal Imagination with anti-Stalinist liberalism and Cold War modernism and emphasizes the importance of American literature to Trilling at the beginning of his career as both a critic and a novelist. Trilling championed those writers—and created fictional characters—whose thinking affirmed and resisted the status quo. The dynamism of dialectical thinking that enlivened his essays also echoed the pluralist model of consensus liberalism, in which multitude conflicts were in continual negotiation. In concluding, the essay suggests that the unfinished novel, perpetually open to interpretation, is an apt tribute to Trilling’s signature mode of thought.Ambitious and having to make his way professionally (he had just become an assistant professor in 1939), Trilling saw American literature as a vehicle of upward mobility for himself, just as it was for Vincent.","PeriodicalId":45821,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139926202","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The new editions of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée and Exilée and Temps Morts from UC Press provide an opportunity for reflection on the texts’ histories. First published in 1982, just before Cha’s tragic murder, Dictée languished in obscurity until being rediscovered by Asian American critics in the 1990s. In the last few years, Dictée has gained increasing mainstream recognition, but that recognition has often been accompanied by criticism of academic scholars, who, despite their efforts in championing Cha’s work, are now viewed as gatekeepers who have avoided grappling with the facts of Cha’s life and death. Evidence that Cha’s life and work can be brought together emerges from the work of poets influenced by her, including Myung Mi Kim and Divya Victor, while the work collected in Exilée usefully places Cha’s writing in the larger context of her work as an artist. The best scholarly readings of Cha’s work, far from denying Cha’s embodiment, close the gap between word and body, following Cha’s own call to explore history “to the very flesh and bone, to the core.”[I]t is undoubtedly gratifying to see this new discovery of Cha by mainstream readers. But it’s a shame that literary scholars, who for 30 years have been her primary champions . . . are now being portrayed as gatekeepers.
{"title":"History in Oblivion","authors":"Timothy Yu","doi":"10.1093/alh/ajad236","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajad236","url":null,"abstract":"The new editions of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée and Exilée and Temps Morts from UC Press provide an opportunity for reflection on the texts’ histories. First published in 1982, just before Cha’s tragic murder, Dictée languished in obscurity until being rediscovered by Asian American critics in the 1990s. In the last few years, Dictée has gained increasing mainstream recognition, but that recognition has often been accompanied by criticism of academic scholars, who, despite their efforts in championing Cha’s work, are now viewed as gatekeepers who have avoided grappling with the facts of Cha’s life and death. Evidence that Cha’s life and work can be brought together emerges from the work of poets influenced by her, including Myung Mi Kim and Divya Victor, while the work collected in Exilée usefully places Cha’s writing in the larger context of her work as an artist. The best scholarly readings of Cha’s work, far from denying Cha’s embodiment, close the gap between word and body, following Cha’s own call to explore history “to the very flesh and bone, to the core.”[I]t is undoubtedly gratifying to see this new discovery of Cha by mainstream readers. But it’s a shame that literary scholars, who for 30 years have been her primary champions . . . are now being portrayed as gatekeepers.","PeriodicalId":45821,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139926292","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
What can we learn about unpublished literature—and literature as such—by studying rejected literature? Each of the article’s four sections connects an archival document or set of documents to a topic in literary history and theory. In the first, a ledger tracking submissions to Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1882 leads to a discussion about recovery projects. In the second, a century of Houghton Mifflin reader reports leads to a discussion about evaluation. In the third, a novel submitted to Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare and Company in 1930 leads to a discussion about historical counterfactuals. In the fourth, correspondence from the archives of Amiri Baraka and his agent, Ronald Hobbs, from the 1970s leads to a discussion about taste. Together, these sections introduce a resource and exemplify a method: how attention to small, practical decisions can illuminate large, abstract processes.By attending to editorial debates about poetry, we can understand what artistic value meant to specific people in specific contexts—and thus what it might mean in general. Poetry, in other words, promises to illuminate what’s literary about literary history.
{"title":"Archives of Rejection","authors":"Joshua Kotin","doi":"10.1093/alh/ajad231","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajad231","url":null,"abstract":"What can we learn about unpublished literature—and literature as such—by studying rejected literature? Each of the article’s four sections connects an archival document or set of documents to a topic in literary history and theory. In the first, a ledger tracking submissions to Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1882 leads to a discussion about recovery projects. In the second, a century of Houghton Mifflin reader reports leads to a discussion about evaluation. In the third, a novel submitted to Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare and Company in 1930 leads to a discussion about historical counterfactuals. In the fourth, correspondence from the archives of Amiri Baraka and his agent, Ronald Hobbs, from the 1970s leads to a discussion about taste. Together, these sections introduce a resource and exemplify a method: how attention to small, practical decisions can illuminate large, abstract processes.By attending to editorial debates about poetry, we can understand what artistic value meant to specific people in specific contexts—and thus what it might mean in general. Poetry, in other words, promises to illuminate what’s literary about literary history.","PeriodicalId":45821,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139926290","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The 1990s witnessed the origin of a decades-long “discipline problem” in queer studies, a conflict between empirical and theoretical approaches, and the two monographs under review—lesbian and gay historian Marc Stein’s Queer Public History: Essays on Scholarly Activism and queer theorist Lee Edelman’s Bad Education: Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing—might seem like excellent candidates to reprise it. However, this review argues that the place where lesbian and gay history and queer theory have now caught up with one another is a structural one. What’s changed since the 1990s is less our disciplines and more the political–economic conditions that sustain them.What unites these two works in a common project, however, is the way each betrays an investment in the possibility—one might say, the hope—of political and social change.
20 世纪 90 年代见证了同性恋研究中长达数十年的 "学科问题 "的起源，见证了实证方法与理论方法之间的冲突，也见证了正在审查的两本专著--同性恋历史学家 Marc Stein 的《同性恋公共历史》和同性恋理论家 Lee Edelman 的《糟糕的教育：学术活动论文集》：和同性恋理论家 Lee Edelman 的《糟糕的教育》：为什么同性恋理论什么也教不了我们？然而，这篇评论认为，女同性恋史和同性恋理论现在相互赶上的地方是结构性的。自 20 世纪 90 年代以来，发生变化的与其说是我们的学科，不如说是支撑这些学科的政治经济条件。然而，将这两部作品结合在一个共同项目中的是，每部作品都对政治和社会变革的可能性--可以说是希望--进行了投资。
{"title":"Queer Studies Now; or, The (Political) Economy, Stupid","authors":"Jordan Alexander Stein","doi":"10.1093/alh/ajad232","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajad232","url":null,"abstract":"The 1990s witnessed the origin of a decades-long “discipline problem” in queer studies, a conflict between empirical and theoretical approaches, and the two monographs under review—lesbian and gay historian Marc Stein’s Queer Public History: Essays on Scholarly Activism and queer theorist Lee Edelman’s Bad Education: Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing—might seem like excellent candidates to reprise it. However, this review argues that the place where lesbian and gay history and queer theory have now caught up with one another is a structural one. What’s changed since the 1990s is less our disciplines and more the political–economic conditions that sustain them.What unites these two works in a common project, however, is the way each betrays an investment in the possibility—one might say, the hope—of political and social change.","PeriodicalId":45821,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139926293","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay is about poetry, publication, and intergenerational caretaking in the context of a mass death event—the HIV/AIDS pandemic. It reads the work of contemporary Black, queer American poets Danez Smith, Jericho Brown, and Pamela Sneed for their intertextual and interpersonal engagement with queer and of-color literary texts and voices (in particular, those of Essex Hemphill, Melvin Dixon, and Donald Woods) under threat of erasure by HIV/AIDS and its effects and aftermaths. In doing so, it argues that Smith, Brown, and Sneed enact in their writing a political, spiritual, and historical project of recuperation and republication, taking the term “republishing” to encompass varying forms of print, performance, allusion, thematic evocation, formal echoes, and citation. In examining the complex, varied, and cross-temporal processes of poetic and scholarly caretaking and kinship—and of publication, “depublication,” and republication—this essay shows that the imprinting of HIV/AIDS into countercanonical poetry offers a crucial, ongoing, and collective counterweight to prevailing assumptions and stereotypes about the virus and the disease it causes, as well as creating and sustaining alternative sites of memory, mourning, and meaning making.The implications of the kind of republishing that Smith, Brown, and Sneed gesture toward—this way of remembering and reminding others of lost texts and writers—are manifold, if complex and unavoidably constrained, and include new readerships; the preservation of stories, legacies, and knowledge; and the mitigation of Black queer literary losses as a result of HIV/AIDS.
{"title":"“Somewhere listening for my name”: Black Queer Kinship and the Poetry of the HIV/AIDS Pandemic","authors":"Rona Cran","doi":"10.1093/alh/ajad226","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajad226","url":null,"abstract":"This essay is about poetry, publication, and intergenerational caretaking in the context of a mass death event—the HIV/AIDS pandemic. It reads the work of contemporary Black, queer American poets Danez Smith, Jericho Brown, and Pamela Sneed for their intertextual and interpersonal engagement with queer and of-color literary texts and voices (in particular, those of Essex Hemphill, Melvin Dixon, and Donald Woods) under threat of erasure by HIV/AIDS and its effects and aftermaths. In doing so, it argues that Smith, Brown, and Sneed enact in their writing a political, spiritual, and historical project of recuperation and republication, taking the term “republishing” to encompass varying forms of print, performance, allusion, thematic evocation, formal echoes, and citation. In examining the complex, varied, and cross-temporal processes of poetic and scholarly caretaking and kinship—and of publication, “depublication,” and republication—this essay shows that the imprinting of HIV/AIDS into countercanonical poetry offers a crucial, ongoing, and collective counterweight to prevailing assumptions and stereotypes about the virus and the disease it causes, as well as creating and sustaining alternative sites of memory, mourning, and meaning making.The implications of the kind of republishing that Smith, Brown, and Sneed gesture toward—this way of remembering and reminding others of lost texts and writers—are manifold, if complex and unavoidably constrained, and include new readerships; the preservation of stories, legacies, and knowledge; and the mitigation of Black queer literary losses as a result of HIV/AIDS.","PeriodicalId":45821,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139926291","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In the early 1940s US–Mexico borderlands, two siblings named Carlos and María de la Torre dedicated years of their lives to drafting, revising, and completing, but not publishing, a 32-page biographical profile of their close friend Fidel Muro, who had been executed by the Mexican government for his participation in the Cristero War (1926–1929). The completed semblanza, which the De la Torres titled “Fidel Muro, Mexican Martyr,” follows Muro from his childhood to his days as a Cristero fighter and, ultimately, to his death as a Cristero martyr. In telling Muro’s story, the De la Torres also memorialize the broader Cristero movement, which sought to overthrow the postrevolutionary Mexican government and replace its secularizing policies with a religious nationalism that insisted on the synonymity of Catholicism and Mexican identity. Though the Cristeros were unsuccessful, exiles like the De la Torres kept the ideals of the movement alive through writing, much of it produced in the US. Cristero writing has garnered far less attention within Mexican and Latinx literary criticism than writing depicting the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), yet I argue that both early twentieth-century conflicts have played a fundamental role in shaping the uneven terrain of US and Mexican modernities.Placing the [De la Torres’] unpublished semblanza at the center of Latina/o/x literary history begins to reveal the multiplicity of conceptualizations of Latina/o/x identity, from the fully realized to the barely imagined.
{"title":"Unpublished Saints: Making Mexican Martyrs in American Archives","authors":"Anita Huízar-Hernández","doi":"10.1093/alh/ajad227","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajad227","url":null,"abstract":"In the early 1940s US–Mexico borderlands, two siblings named Carlos and María de la Torre dedicated years of their lives to drafting, revising, and completing, but not publishing, a 32-page biographical profile of their close friend Fidel Muro, who had been executed by the Mexican government for his participation in the Cristero War (1926–1929). The completed semblanza, which the De la Torres titled “Fidel Muro, Mexican Martyr,” follows Muro from his childhood to his days as a Cristero fighter and, ultimately, to his death as a Cristero martyr. In telling Muro’s story, the De la Torres also memorialize the broader Cristero movement, which sought to overthrow the postrevolutionary Mexican government and replace its secularizing policies with a religious nationalism that insisted on the synonymity of Catholicism and Mexican identity. Though the Cristeros were unsuccessful, exiles like the De la Torres kept the ideals of the movement alive through writing, much of it produced in the US. Cristero writing has garnered far less attention within Mexican and Latinx literary criticism than writing depicting the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), yet I argue that both early twentieth-century conflicts have played a fundamental role in shaping the uneven terrain of US and Mexican modernities.Placing the [De la Torres’] unpublished semblanza at the center of Latina/o/x literary history begins to reveal the multiplicity of conceptualizations of Latina/o/x identity, from the fully realized to the barely imagined.","PeriodicalId":45821,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139926284","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Daniel Diez Couch’s American Fragments offers a scholarly analysis of the fragment, a mainstay of American print culture in the early national period. In American Fragments, Couch argues that fragments were central to both American aesthetics and American political culture. Insisting that the fragment was an inclusive and progressive form that invited readers to consider the relationship between a part and the whole, Couch shows how fragments helped Americans understand themselves and their place in a democratic republic. Couch’s book is deeply researched, and it provides insightful readings of well-known texts like Hannah Fosters’s The Coquette, Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly, and Washington Irving’s Sketch Book while also introducing readers to a host of poems and other shorter writings that appeared in newspapers, periodicals, and gift books throughout the early nineteenth century. The original research in American Fragments is engaging, and it is also emblematic of a new wave of scholarship enabled by the widespread digitization of books and newspapers in that it introduces so many new texts that are difficult to connect to existing timelines and canons. In this respect, Couch’s book also reveals the limitations of the monograph as a tool for revisioning our collective scholarly project.[R]ight now, the scholarship pushing us to reimagine our literary past is running ahead of the forms in which it might be published.
{"title":"American Literary History in Pieces","authors":"Bryan Sinche","doi":"10.1093/alh/ajad233","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajad233","url":null,"abstract":"Daniel Diez Couch’s American Fragments offers a scholarly analysis of the fragment, a mainstay of American print culture in the early national period. In American Fragments, Couch argues that fragments were central to both American aesthetics and American political culture. Insisting that the fragment was an inclusive and progressive form that invited readers to consider the relationship between a part and the whole, Couch shows how fragments helped Americans understand themselves and their place in a democratic republic. Couch’s book is deeply researched, and it provides insightful readings of well-known texts like Hannah Fosters’s The Coquette, Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly, and Washington Irving’s Sketch Book while also introducing readers to a host of poems and other shorter writings that appeared in newspapers, periodicals, and gift books throughout the early nineteenth century. The original research in American Fragments is engaging, and it is also emblematic of a new wave of scholarship enabled by the widespread digitization of books and newspapers in that it introduces so many new texts that are difficult to connect to existing timelines and canons. In this respect, Couch’s book also reveals the limitations of the monograph as a tool for revisioning our collective scholarly project.[R]ight now, the scholarship pushing us to reimagine our literary past is running ahead of the forms in which it might be published.","PeriodicalId":45821,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139926434","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay offers a close reading of Lionel Trilling’s unfinished second novel, The Journey Abandoned (2008). Drawing on Trilling’s essays and private journals, it considers how The Journey Abandoned’s unfinishedness speaks not only to some of the thematic preoccupations of the novel itself—a story of thwarted literary ambition and wasted creative talent—but also to some of the broader currents in Trilling’s thinking about his own literary ambition, the fate of the novel, and the institutionalization of literary studies at midcentury. If we think of the unfinishedness of The Journey Abandoned as integral rather than accidental to its form, we can begin to see how the text captures something of Trilling’s ambivalence about his relation to literature, an ambivalence that animated his criticism but seems to have ultimately forestalled his fiction.Whether he wished it to or not, unfinishedness became Trilling’s way of dramatizing the tensions and contradictions underwriting his conception of literary value and his sense of himself as a writer.
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