American Literature in Transition, 1770–1828 ed. by William Huntting Howell and Greta Lafleur (review)

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Reviewed by:

• American Literature in Transition, 1770–1828 ed. by William Huntting Howell and Greta Lafleur
• Patrick M. Erben (bio)

American Literature in Transition, 1770–1828
edited by william huntting howell and greta lafleur
Cambridge University Press, 2022
366 pp.

Reading American Literature in Transition, 1770–1828 feels like attending a conference of the Society of Early Americanists or C19: Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists: the variety of critical and scholarly approaches, diversity of contributors, and breadth of subjects demonstrate the vitality and maturation of the field of early American studies. Howell and LaFleur's collection should put to rest debates about whether our field suffers a theory deficit and neglects aesthetics and form. The volume's essays adroitly handle topics as wide-ranging as using queer crip theory and decolonizing Native literary aesthetics; they also sharpen our attention to genre with a scope of themes including paranoid style and revival hymn poetics. The volume's wealth of information, density of primary text references, and bibliographic coverage also equip anyone teaching early American literature courses with fresh pedagogical impulses and a wellspring of spin-off subjects to guide undergraduate and graduate research; as with good teaching, the essays assiduously note the greater amount of work remaining to be done on a variety of topics, texts, authors, and archives. Yet [End Page 167] herein also lies a bit of the crux: to achieve this coverage, individual essays perform a feat of scholarly compression that is sometimes difficult to unpack. As the volume is part of a larger anthological series, Nineteenth-Century American Literature in Transition (edited by Cody Marrs), this comes as no surprise; indeed, one can sense each writer's struggle to distill their knowledge into such compact servings. After reading this volume, one may crave the scholarly expansion found in the authors' longer-form work in journals and monographs, for which the essays collected here serve as a veritable amuse-bouche. My "how to use this book" advice is to sample from its rich menu according to critical taste, scholarly interest, and pedagogical demands.

What I appreciate most about Howell and LaFleur's introduction is the way they foreground their personal motivations, the present political stakes of scholarly work on the US national founding period, and the dialoguing between "cultural instability" (15) in the present and the many transformations of the early national period. The volume understands its episodic approach ("exposure and assemblage") as a corrective to the "consensus history" that, especially in present-day right-wing ideological framing, endows the early Republic with a mythos of "probity and clarity" (1). The essays gathered under three sections ("Form and Genre," "Networks," and "Methods for Living") should thus be understood as "a generative and deeply interesting cacophony instead of a triumphal march" (1), especially by focusing "on the quotidian and even the banal" rather than "the exceptional" (13). I understand the rhetorical valency of such terms to signal the disruption of received political narratives and staid literary methodologies, but their hyperbolic tone actually belies a bit of what makes the volume strong—that bedfellows like a survey of foundational legal documents and a deep dive into early national cookbooks are not strange after all, for both tease out how texts seeking to create order actually mask power, inequality, and exploitation. But maybe if the editors promised a "cacophony" and my reading experience yielded through-threads among seemingly disparate essays, the volume's "generative" approach has simply achieved its purpose.

The section on "Form and Genre" features the largest number of essays, contrasting contributions on mainstays of early Republican letters, such as the "Genteel Novel" and the "Statesman's Address," with more commonly ignored forms, such as evangelical poetry and cookbooks. Matthew Garrett's "The Law of Form and the Form of Law" reveals the literary strategy [End Page 168] of documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as integral to the nation-building project: like literary synthesis, the state "organizes the component parts into an imaginary whole on the basis of their simultaneous autonomy and collective functionality" (25). Though becoming more inclusive in its "expression of citizenry" (22), the early national mode of social organization and rhetorical...