Canons by Consensus: Critical Trends and American Literature Anthologies
By Joseph Csicsila and Tom Quirk
()
About this ebook
The first systematic analysis of American literature textbooks used by college instructors in the last century
Scholars have long noted the role that college literary anthologies play in the rising and falling reputations of American authors. Canons by Consensus examines this classroom fixture in detail to challenge and correct a number of assumptions about the development of the literary canon throughout the 20th century.
Joseph Csicsila analyzes more than 80 anthologies published since 1919 and traces not only the critical fortunes of individual authors, but also the treatment of entire genres and groupings of authors by race, region, gender, and formal approach. In doing so, he calls into question accusations of deliberate or inadvertent sexism and racism. Selections by anthology editors, Csicsila demonstrates, have always been governed far more by prevailing trends in academic criticism than by personal bias.
Academic anthologies are found to constitute a rich and often overlooked resource for studying American literature, as well as an irrefutable record of the academy’s changing literary tastes throughout the last century.
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Canons by Consensus - Joseph Csicsila
Canons by Consensus
STUDIES IN AMERICAN LITERARY REALISM AND NATURALISM
SERIES EDITOR
Gary Scharnhorst
EDITORIAL BOARD
Louis J. Budd
Donna Campbell
John Crowley
Robert E. Fleming
Eric Haralson
Katherine Kearns
Joseph McElrath
George Monteiro
Brenda Murphy
James Nagel
Alice Hall Petry
Donald Pizer
Tom Quirk
Jeanne Campbell Reesman
Ken Roemer
Susan Rosowski
Canons by Consensus
Critical Trends and American Literature Anthologies
JOSEPH CSICSILA
Foreword by Tom Quirk
THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS
Tuscaloosa
Copyright © 2004
The University of Alabama Press
Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Typeface: Minion
∞
The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Science–Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI Z39.48–1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Csicsila, Joseph, 1968–
Canons by consensus : critical trends and American literature anthologies / Joseph Csicsila ; foreword by Tom Quirk.
p. cm. — (Studies in American literary realism and naturalism)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8173-1397-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. American literature—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 2. Literature publishing—United States. 3. Criticism—United States. 4. Anthologies—Editing. 5. Canon (Literature) I. Title. II. Series.
PS25.C78 2004
810.9—dc22
2003027608
Sections of chapter four have appeared in Essays in Arts and Sciences (XXIX) October 2000 and Mark Twain Among the Scholars, ed. Richard Hill and Jim McWilliams.
Albany, NY: Whitston Publishing Co., 2002.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8173-8178-3 (electronic)
For Larry, Alan, and Joe
Three wise men
Contents
Foreword by Tom Quirk
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Historical Context
2. Early- and Mid-Nineteenth-Century Prose: Irving, Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville
3. Nineteenth-Century Poetry: Whitman, Dickinson, Alice Cary, Phoebe Cary, Larcom, Thaxter, Lanier, Tabb
4. Post–Civil War Prose: Twain, Harte, Howells, James
5. Latter-Nineteenth-Century Prose: Stowe, Jewett, Freeman, Chopin
6. The African American Heritage: Equiano, Jacobs, Douglass, Dunbar, Chesnutt, Harper
7. Early-Twentieth-Century Women Writers: Wharton, Cather, Glasgow
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Foreword
Tom Quirk
Joseph Csicsila’s Canons by Consensus: Critical Trends and American Literature Anthologies is an innovative piece of scholarship—provocative by implication, lucid in presentation, steady in judgment. What the author has done is to methodically drill test bores through strata of representations of American literature in eighty-plus anthologies from 1919 to 1999. By restricting his focus to a limited, but still significant, number of American writers and tracing their critical fortunes through these classroom textbooks, he is able to contest and even contradict a number of rash assumptions about canon formation, including polemical accusations of deliberate or inadvertent sexism and racism involving a long line of literary scholars and editors. No one in the future ought to be able to make overarching claims about the American literary canon without first checking out here the facts of the cases in question. For Csicsila’s book describes in empirical fashion just what those facts are. What is more, he charts the fluctuations of literary reputation as they fared through three generations
of anthologies. One risk the author ran in addressing the subject in these chronological layers was that his arguments would become repetitious as he traced author after author through generations of anthologies. But this is not the case. The prose is nuanced throughout and situates the critical trends within contemporary critical debate, often in ways that took place outside of academic offices or campus libraries. His frequent references to Edmund Wilson are a case in point, since Wilson himself did not edit anthologies yet did much to shape debate on the merits of several writers (Harriet Beecher Stowe and Kate Chopin, among others).
Csicsila also pays some attention to the practical requirements of book production (for example, how the weight of paper necessarily affected the length of an anthology, which in turn affected how many texts and authors could be represented). There are several additional complicating factors, but I think, all in all, Csicsila was wise to leave certain nebulous dimensions of his subject unexamined. For example, he does not specify the college clientele for these texts. Clearly, when the vast majority of college students were white males, the tendency to replicate the interests and tastes of that readership could have influenced the nature of anthologies. However, these are largely marketing and commercial decisions, and the editors themselves may or may not have been under pressure to make selections mirroring their audience. In any event, the sometimes strident claims made about canon formation are seldom directed at the book-publishing industry itself but rather at the academics who edited those texts. Canon formation, everyone should remember, is not the only endeavor where the capitalist lion and Marxist lamb have seen fit to frolic together.
Equally intangible is the problematic matter of copyright permissions. Perhaps it is worthwhile to note, for example, that there is no professional journal or even a directory of permissions editors in the country. Nonetheless, when one steps beyond that fluctuating line between the realm of public domain and the undiscovered country of what intrigues current readers, permissions editors immediately step forward to greet you there. But they themselves don’t seem to know who the other guardians are, even though permissions costs are a crucial factor in the anthologizing process. Negotiating these permissions costs is like dickering at a vast garage sale, where no one seems connected with anyone else, or to possess any sense of aesthetic, pedagogical, or other values. By dealing primarily with works that were and are, for the most part, in the public domain, Professor Csicsila has rightly eliminated a powerful element that looms outside the central question of how editorial judgments, over several generations, have made an impact on our notions of the American canon.
Another thing Csicsila astutely chose not to do was to conjure up sociological profiles of the three generations he designates. The historiographical generation, for one, is often portrayed as reflecting socialist imperatives brought about by the Depression. In the midst of the Depression it would certainly be understandable that the themes of, say, Edith Wharton might be deemed too far removed from the grim realities of the day. Still, as Csicsila points out, Wharton did have her champions even then. By contrast, the New Critical generation has been characterized as suffering from a Cold War mentality—nervous, conservative, to a degree escapist. But several anthologizers of that period—for example, Wright, Bode, and Howard—were anything but New Critics. The author was right to avoid this kind of tidy explanation, partly because it has been done elsewhere, partly because that path would make him stray from his announced method, but mostly because that sort of explanation in the last analysis doesn’t really reveal very much, either because the theory behind it is flawed or the facts of the case won’t support it. To give a single instance, one of Willa Cather’s favorite critics (of her own work and of others) was Randolph Bourne, and when he died of influenza in 1918, she thought it was a great loss to American culture. Bourne was a self-described left-wing literary radical
; Cather was politically conservative. The reasons for this affinity lie outside the tidy sphere of ideologies.
In brief, then, this focused study amounts to only one approach to investigating the issues behind canon formation. However, Csicsila’s way, empirically verifiable, has that advantage over more theoretical methods, and turns up a number of surprises, as the reader will soon discover in the following chapters. There will inevitably be mysteries of the anthologizing process that possibly can never be explained. It is easy enough to understand why genuinely talented or socially important white male writers (O. Henry, Frank R. Stockton, Lafcadio Hearn, Richard Harding Davis, Booth Tarkington, Steven Vincent Benet, James Branch Cabell, William Vaughn Moody, Upton Sinclair, Conrad Richter, Thornton Wilder, and our first Nobel Prize winner, Sinclair Lewis, as well as others) should have drifted out of sight. But why aren’t the names of Mary Noailles Murfree, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Zona Gale, Ruth Suckow, Fannie Hurst, Dorothy Parker, Helen Hunt Jackson, or Edna Ferber more visible in the literary classroom? Henry James thought Woolson at least as good as Freeman or Jewett. The absence I find especially mystifying is the near total neglect of Pearl Buck, our second Nobel Prize winner. It may be that Buck’s religious faith was an impediment to her reputation, but that doesn’t seem to diminish the reputations of Stowe or Lydia Maria Child. My point here is that as supposedly inclusive
as contemporary notions of the canon seem to be, there remains some sort of, perhaps unexamined, exclusionary principle at work. Canons by Consensus, because it is an inquiry that drives at the heart of this controversy, may permit others to more precisely frame the sorts of questions they wish to ask about canon formation.
At any rate, Joseph Csicsila makes it clear that unquestionably talented writers (Ellen Glasgow, for example) may be in danger of being wholly forgotten. His study should help readers be more alert to what is being lost, as well as sensitive to what has been recovered. However, as the epilogue indicates, the very recent changes in anthology publication may well usher in a computer technology
generation of canon rearrangement and production. Any number of publishers now advise college teachers to make your own
anthology from a list of selections, and a shrink-wrapped edition will be delivered to their door. Online e-texts
offer another alternative avenue for instruction and canon building, as do CD-ROM and hypertext solutions. No one can yet foretell what the exact consequences of these options may be. Perhaps, observes Csicsila, there will be a newfound liberation for teachers and students alike; conceivably the resulting changes will, instead, bring about mainly confusion
in our literary culture. He is sanguine, in his concluding view, that the best literature will outlast any particular presentation of it and that, in the end, it requires no special pleading from any quarter.
Acknowledgments
I would like to begin by expressing my indebtedness to the late Daniel McKeithan, whose extensive collection of American literature anthologies provided the basis for this study. I am also obliged to Irene Wong and the rest of the Gribben family, Alan, Valerie, and Walter, for preserving this rare collection.
In the course of my research I have relied on the assistance of numerous scholars, particularly Lou Budd, Vic Doyno, Gary Scharnhorst, Tom Quirk, David E. E. Sloane, Ann Ryan, Robert Evans, George Perkins, Russ Larson, Ann Blakeslee, Janis Stout, Darlene Unrue, Jane Hafen, and Stephanie Wardrop. My colleagues at Eastern Michigan University have been extremely supportive, and I am especially thankful to the members of our Sunday evening discussion group, Andrea Kaston Tange, Lori Burlingame, Annette Wannamaker, Laura George, Craig Dionne, and Jim Knapp. My graduate assistants have been as invaluable as they have been inspiring, and I would like to thank in particular Sara Mulder, Jane Hughes, Denise Yezbick, Josh Veith, Adam Hazlett, Scott Still, Erin Anderson, and Cass Amundson. My appreciation also to Pat Healy, Cindy Young, and Carol Post. A very special thanks to Chip Rhodes, Jeff Duncan, and John Hosko for their counsel and conversation, literary and otherwise.
The expert staff at The University of Alabama Press have been a pleasure to work with and have made the editing of this book a supremely manageable task. Also, my appreciation to Sara Mulder for her careful eye and painstaking attention to detail in compiling the index.
I wish to thank my parents, Joe and Beth Csicsila, for their unconditional support and their never-ending encouragement and my brothers for supplying me with constant sources of motivation. I am also grateful to Barb and Lanny Henderson for the trust they have placed in me over the years, and I would like to thank them for having taken such great interest in my work.
I have been exceedingly fortunate to have studied under three extraordinarily devoted and infinitely patient scholars. My thanks to Joseph McCullough, who guided me through the original manuscript; Alan Gribben, who furnished the vision and read multiple drafts; and Lawrence Berkove, who laid the foundation for it all.
Finally, my deepest gratitude to my family. My two little boys, Joseph and Henry, put up with many long hours of research and writing when they would much rather have had their father playing with them. But they behaved splendidly (for the most part) through it all and were always there waiting for me with big smiles, long hugs, and lots of kisses. My wife, Vail, has quietly (for the most part) endured much over the last ten years. I will be forever grateful to her for the enormous and loving sacrifices she has made for me and my work. There isn’t a day that passes that I don’t marvel at what you do for us.
Introduction
Only a handful of studies have previously noted the part that college-level literature textbooks have played historically in the rising and falling reputations of American authors and texts. Yet as Henry Louis Gates Jr. observed in 1992, a well-marked anthology functions in the academy to create a tradition, as well as to define and preserve it.
¹ Indeed, most scholars would agree that American literature as a field, American literature anthologies, and criticism of individual American authors have essentially evolved together since the early 1920s, influencing each other in innumerable ways. Critical appraisals of Emily Dickinson, for instance, have always affected how anthologies have presented her work; simultaneously, her academic reception has encouraged new scholarship devoted to her poems. But within this network of mutually influential forces, the salient role of the literary anthology remains largely overlooked in literary research.
Among the few glances at literature anthologies as a shaping force in American literary criticism are a chapter in Jane Tompkins’s Sensational Designs (1985), which passingly investigated Nathaniel Hawthorne’s inclusion in literature textbooks, and Keneth Kinnamon’s Three Black Writers and the Anthologized Canon,
a 1994 look at how American anthology editors have treated the work of Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and James Weldon Johnson.² These and a few other academics have come to recognize that the standing of American authors and works has always been related to inclusions in and exclusions from literature anthologies. After all, these editorial decisions essentially dictate who is taught in college classrooms across the country and how.
Attending the scarcity of inquiries about this topic is the absence of any accurate record of precisely which authors have appeared in textbooks since the advent of the modern-day anthology format in the 1920s. Nevertheless, despite the lack of a reliable record several recent scholars have proceeded to theorize about the history of college-level American literature anthologies. Such blind speculation about which authors and what works have appeared in literary textbooks has then become an unchallenged foundation for subsequent scholarship. Among such cases are the repeated charges that early anthology editors routinely excluded women writers from their collections. There were, to be sure, blind spots in the vision of pre-1970s literature textbooks (their near-wholesale disregard of African American writers, for instance). But women authors were hardly neglected. In fact, a thorough census reveals that college-level anthologies of American literature regularly featured the work of female writers, including Emily Dickinson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Edith Wharton, and Ellen Glasgow, typically with as much attentiveness and generosity of space as that conferred by today’s presumably more enlightened
textbooks. Elizabeth Ammons’s claim that textbooks of American literature systematically minimized or omitted white women,
³ then, cannot possibly be corroborated by the textual evidence, especially in light of the fact that the presentations many women writers received in textbooks of the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s matched or exceeded the amount of space each has been accorded in the recently published The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (1996).
Equally problematic is the method by which some commentators have constructed canonical arguments by citing only selected anthologies, particularly those of the early 1960s. Readers are left to infer that these specialized texts are representative, which leads to a mistaken understanding of the development of literature anthologies and the historical reputations of American writers and texts. To take one instance, Tompkins’s Sensational Designs asserts that Fred Lewis Pattee’s Century Readings for a Course in American Literature (1919) and Perry Miller’s Major Writers of America (1962) are representative
literary textbooks for their respective times.⁴ Her argument then lists nearly sixty writers supposedly dropped from the anthology format between 1919 and 1962 (among them Abraham Lincoln, Bret Harte, Hamlin Garland, George Washington Cable, Joel Chandler Harris, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary Wilkins Freeman, to name only a few). Tompkins concludes that in addition to a sharp narrowing in the range and number of authors, there has been a virtual rewriting of literary history
in anthologies of American literature between the publications of Pattee’s and Miller’s textbooks.⁵
Assuredly, if one were to accept as representative
Pattee’s anthology, which contained 117 writers, and Miller’s anthology, which included fewer than 30 writers, one would have to deduce, as Tompkins does, that sometime after 1919 and before 1962 literally scores of writers had been unceremoniously dropped from the annals of American literary history and that the anthology of American literature had been radically reconfigured. However, neither the overarching assertion that Pattee’s and Miller’s anthologies amount to representative
collections nor the contention that dozens of meritorious writers were discarded from textbooks between 1919 and 1962 proves to be accurate. As we will see, Pattee’s anthology, though standard in its broad coverage of American letters, was decidedly out of sync with its contemporaries in its editorial assumptions, as well as in its choice of literary materials. Likewise, the drastically reduced contents of Miller’s anthology were highly unusual for that day. As a matter of fact, no fewer than eighteen anthologies of American literature were in print as of 1962 (including a revised edition of Pattee’s textbook). The overwhelming majority of these anthologies collected the work of at least one hundred writers, including most of those authors believed by Tompkins to have been tossed out of anthologies by 1962.⁶ These and other erroneous notions concerning American literature anthologies deserve correction.
Critical debate involving the anthology of American literature inevitably leads to issues of the canon,
for as John Guillory and others have rightly pointed out, the problem of the canon is the problem of syllabus and curriculum.
⁷ Among the most informed studies of canon theory to date is Wendell Harris’s 1991 PMLA article, Canonicity.
Harris’s groundbreaking analysis suggests that scholarship related to canonicity, especially in recent years, has operated, at best, under a lax assumption about universal agreement over what is meant by the canon
as well as about the forces that construct such lists. At worst, he points out, canonical debates have functioned under a misconception that anything even resembling The Canon ever existed at all.
By distinguishing among several types of canons and rethinking the process of canon formulation, Harris builds on Alastair Fowler’s generally accepted list of six types of literary canons and adds to it another four varieties, bringing the total number of classifications to ten. These categories range from the all-inclusive potential canon
(which comprises the entire written corpus, together with all surviving oral literature
) to the highly selective personal canon
(the list of texts with which a specific individual is familiar) and also include such specialized cases as the biblical canon
and the pedagogical canon.
His conclusions are immensely helpful for their ability to penetrate to the central critical question of our times. If we have not one canon of literature but many, no canon formation but, rather, constant processes of text selection, no selection based on a single criterion, and no escape from the necessity of selection, to attack The Canon is to misconceive the problem.
⁸ Put another way, critics who pursue a relentless assault against such an elusive construct as The Canon not only partake in an utterly irresolvable inquiry but also frustrate the possibility for a substantive understanding of the forces involved in canonical evolution.
Among the categories of canon that Harris adds to the original Fowlerian six are two varieties, the diachronic canon and the nonce canon, that he suggests currently enjoy preferred status within the academy for very different reasons. According to Harris the diachronic canon consists of the glacially changing core of literary figures
who have received special recognition in selection after selection over centuries or at least decades.
⁹ Oftentimes critics of The Canon, particularly those who attack its inherent exclusivity, have in mind something close to this definition. Yet, as all but the most zealous skeptics of The Canon seem to have conceded, there is the difficulty of deciding which textual selections among the countless that have appeared over time have been granted authority (and by whom?). Another problem is the fact that such objectors have hardly reached any consensus about who precisely belongs to this elusive and hallowed assembly, except that they are typically male, dead, and white. As a result, this category of canon usually serves as a sort of straw-man canon
and leads to charges of gross historical inequity.
The nonce canon, on the other hand, is an utterly tangible category comprising authors and works that are passed along from one generation to the next through anthologies and scholarly texts. Recently, several commentators, including Paul Lauter, Tom Quirk, and Gary Scharnhorst, have effectually endorsed (though not by Harris’s name) this sort of classification as among the most appropriate arenas for the study of an American canon. Lauter, for instance, who is currently general editor of The Heath Anthology of American Literature, defines the American literary canon in his Canons and Contexts as that set of authors and works generally included in basic American literature college courses and textbooks, and those ordinarily discussed in standard volumes of literary history, bibliography, or criticism.
¹⁰ Milton Stern, coeditor of the popular Viking Portable American Literature Survey of the 1960s and 1970s, emphasizes the fluidity of literary canons when he points out that the selection of authors and texts in literature anthologies shapes what gets taught and, we hope, READ in American college classes. And that shapes what is accepted as canonical at that moment.
¹¹
Given an emerging consensus regarding conceptions of the canon, what we are left with, then, if we are to discuss an American canon effectually, is a two-part question. First, what has actually appeared in college-level anthologies since their inception soon after World War I? This question can be answered by a perusal of the more than eighty major anthologies of American literature designed specifically for the college classroom published between 1919 and 1999, and in part this study attempts to provide that resource.
The second question, equally relevant, involves identifying the factors that determined what did and did not appear in these textbooks. Obviously, this issue of selection criteria cannot be adequately grasped until what was selected for inclusion in American literature anthologies has been established. Suffice it to say that the majority of past scholarly characterizations of the content of literary textbooks, as well as charges of wholesale editorial prejudice by conspiratorial power structures, turns out to have been off the mark. Evidence indicates that the selection of authors and materials literary by anthology editors, today as in the past, is governed far more by prevailing trends in academic criticism than by personal biases.
The historical evolution of the anthology of American literature designed expressly for use in the college classroom occurred in three distinct phases since about 1920. Each of these phases corresponds with the impact of a dominant trend in American academic criticism. The first period of the college-level American literature anthology opened, we might say, with the appearance of Fred Lewis Pattee’s Century Readings for a Course in American Literature (1919) and came to a close by about 1946, the period during which literary historiography reigned as the principal influence over scholarship in the United States. The second phase of the American literature anthology commenced with the publication of the third edition of Norman Foerster’s American Poetry and Prose (1947) and extended to the mid-1960s, which corresponds with the rise and decline of New Criticism within the academy. The third phase commenced about 1967 with the third edition of the still highly successful The American Tradition in Literature and continues through to the present, a period that has witnessed an increased awareness of and attention to multicultural interests in literary criticism. Each of the three phases of the anthology of American literature in the twentieth century was shaped fundamentally by the leading trend in the criticism of its time.
1
The Historical Context
The story of the American literature anthology really begins in the late nineteenth century with the desire of a number of university scholars to formalize the study of their nation’s own literary artists. Although more than a century had passed since the United States gained its political freedom from Great Britain, English departments in American universities as of 1900 still had not fully achieved a sense of literary independence. Americans, harboring a sense of provincial inferiority, were wary about maintaining that their own literary past could be ranked with the hallowed traditions of England and Europe. American literature was very young by comparison, and most of the reading public—including all but a few academic scholars—believed that American literature was not yet as aesthetically elevated as the literature of the Old World. Universities did occasionally offer courses in designated types of American writers in the final decades of the nineteenth century, but for a student to announce an intention to study literature at this time invariably meant that the student would study English literature.
The slow growth of an academic curriculum in American literature seems lethargic indeed when contrasted to the maturation of other curricula of academic study in American universities at the time, such as American history. Less than 10 percent of the more than 150 universities in the United States had developed fledgling graduate programs in American literature by 1900, and according to Kermit Vanderbilt’s landmark study, American Literature and the Academy: Roots, Growth, and Maturity of a Profession (1986), only four Ph.D.s had emerged in the field.
¹ By contrast, scholars of American historical studies reported that almost nine-tenths of the historical dissertations written in American universities in the Eighties and Nineties dealt with native subjects.
² By the 1890s most universities were offering equal selections of courses in ancient, European, and American history. Even within the relatively few colleges that were teaching American poetry and prose, the literature of England and other modern European languages received vastly more attention.
Attempts by literary scholars to organize during the 1880s managed to move their profession toward specialized treatments of American literature. In 1883, together with nearly forty language and literature specialists from universities around the country, A. Marshall Elliott founded the Modern Language Association of America, and one year later that group published the first edition of the Publications of the Modern Language Association of America. Also instrumental at about this time, suggests Vanderbilt, was a national consciousness of the deaths of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in the 1880s and then of James Russell Lowell (1891), John Greenleaf Whittier (1892), Oliver Wendell Holmes (1894), and Harriet Beecher Stowe (1896), which appear to have deepened a sense that an era had ended and could begin to be duly assessed.
³
Book-length collections of American literature marketed for the general public also played a crucial role in shifting national attention to its own literary past. Although these collections had been popular with American readers since the mid-1800s, colleges only gradually adopted this anthology format in the classroom. Evelyn Bibb’s invaluable study of literary anthologies records that several scholars trace the first true college text
of American literature back to John Seely Hart’s Manual of American Literature, published in 1872 (scholars likewise credit Hart with offering, at Princeton, the first college course in American literature at an American university that same year).⁴ Hart’s collection, like its contemporaries that were intended for a more general readership, was suggestive of a biographical dictionary or encyclopedia supplemented by small excerpts of poems and prose and represented the work of literally hundreds of American authors. Concerning the logic of these early anthologies, Bibb explained, The general aim is full coverage of the literature; and [an] underlying assumption is that a sampling of the work of an author is better than no representation at all.
⁵ Detailed attention to factual data and biography and the absence of historical and interpretive information characterized these first literary collections. But despite such limitations, Hart’s anthology laid out the format for subsequent classroom texts.
Coinciding with the rising interest in American letters in the American academy during the 1880s, the next stage in the development of the academic American literary anthology grew out of attempts by scholars to apply critical methodology to the study of literature. In November 1878 Moses Coit Tyler published his renowned two-volume Literary History of the American Revolution, a work of great importance for having pioneered the art of literary historiography. Tyler’s connective critical approach revolutionized American literature studies, and for at least the next half-century it became the dominant mode in academic literary scholarship. Forty years later the editors of The Cambridge History of American Literature (1917–21), which Vanderbilt lauds as an epochal
achievement in the history of American literary study, praised Tyler’s work as notable and still unsurpassed.
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Moving the study of literature beyond mere biography and fact gathering, literary historiographers such as Tyler essentially approached the body of American letters as a portal to the American mind and spirit. According to them, American literature (which in concept at that time also included political and scientific documents) was the written record of the American cultural milieu, and, as such, it reflected and preserved the nation’s fundamental characteristics and thought. There is but one thing more interesting than the intellectual history of a man,
declared Tyler in his literary history of colonial America, and that is the intellectual history of a nation.
⁷ As an archival repository of the American spirit literature was at best considered only secondarily as a formidable artistic expression. For literary historiography the works of literature themselves became a means for study rather than the subject of study. Literary historians did make small gestures toward demonstrating aesthetic values in the literature, but