A Companion to American Literary Studies E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1432

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

A Companion to American Literary Studies addresses the most provocative questions, subjects, and issues animating the field. Essays provide readers with the knowledge and conceptual tools for understanding American literary studies as it is practiced today, and chart new directions for the future of the subject.

• Offers up-to-date accounts of major new critical approaches to American literary studies
• Presents state-of-the-art essays on a full range of topics central to the field
• Essays explore critical and institutional genealogies of the field, increasingly diverse conceptions of American literary study, and unprecedented material changes such as the digital revolution
• A unique anthology in the field, and an essential resource for libraries, faculty, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

Notes on Contributors

Introduction

Acknowledgments

Part I: Forms

1 Poetry, Prose, and the Politics of Literary Form

2 The Critical Work of American Literature

Franklin’s Systemic Reading Lessons: Capitalism as Cannibalism

Hawthorne’s Systemic Reading Lessons: The Whole System of Society

Afterword: A Note on the Creative Work of American Literature

3 Women’s Worlds in the Nineteenth-Century US Novel

Rich and Famous – and Happy?

Children

Names in Public

Tutelage

Danger

Conclusion: Our Nig and the Labor of Women’s Writing

4 The Secularization Narrative and Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Thirsting for Knowledge: Wieland and the End of Epistemology

Prophecy and Sacred American History in The Book of Mormon

Begetting and Believing: Du Bois’s Genealogy

5 Literatures of Technology, Technologies of Literature

Emerson’s Question Concerning Technology

Franklin’s Technology of the Self

The Work of Art in the Age of Iron Mills and the Dynamo

Epilogue: The Digital Future

6 Excluded Middles: Social Inequality in American Literature

7 Narrative Medicine, Biocultures, and the Visualization of Health and Disease

From Narrative Medicine to Biocultures

Medicine’s Visual Culture

Conclusion

8 Performance Anxieties: The A-Literary Companions of American Literary Studies

Ages and Stages

Performing Anxiety

9 Drama, Theatre, and Performance before O’Neill

10 Disliking It: American Poetry and American Literary Studies

11 After the New Americanists: The Progress of Romance and the Romance of Progress in American Literary Studies

12 Mass Media and Literary Culture at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Part II: Spaces

13 Cabeza de Vaca, Lope de Oviedo, and Americas Exceptionalism

14 Worlding America: The Hemispheric Text-Network

Benito Cereno and the Hemispheric Text-Network

Antecedents without Influences: Hugo’s Bug-Jargal

Spanish: Everyone’s Language of Conspiracy

The Translator in the Network: Ritchie’s The Slave-King

Descendants, Antecedents, and Precedents C.L.R. James in the Text-Network

15 Worlds of Color, Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in Early American Literary History

The Picture of Human Life in The Scarlet Letter

Revisiting the World of The Scarlet Letter Today

16 Transatlantic Returns

Space and Time

Periodization

17 American Literature in Transnational Perspective: The Case of Mark Twain

18 Southern Literary Studies

The South: World and Nation

The South Not Itself

The New Southern Studies

An End to Southern Studies?

19 New Regionalisms: US-Caribbean Literary Relations

20 American Literature as Ecosystem: The Examples of Euclides da Cunha and Cormac McCarthy

The Natural Sciences and Ecosystems

Euclides da Cunha and the Law of Extraterritoriality

McCarthy, Biocentrism, and Literature as Ecosystem

21 Settler States of Feeling: National Belonging and the Erasure of Native American Presence

The Affective Life of Jurisdiction

Citizenship and Its Discontents

22 Tribal Nations and the Other Territories of American Indian Literary History

The Territories of Tribal Nation Writing

International Indigeneity

23 Globalization

Part III: Practices

24 Democratic Cultures and the First Century of US Literature

Democratic Conflict and Early US Literature

Frontier Democracy

Self Culture versus Interpersonal Democracy

Conclusion: Democracy

25 American Literature and Law

26 Sexuality and American Literary Studies

27 Exquisite Fragility: Human Being in the Aftermath of War

28 The Posthuman Turn: Rewriting Species in Recent American Literature

The Alien Moment

The Cyborg Moment

The Animal Moment

29 Narrative and Intellectual Disability

30 Reading for Asian American Literature

New Directions for Literary History

Asian American Historiographic Fictions

31 Untangling Genealogy’s Tangled Skeins: Alexander Crummell, James McCune Smith, and Nineteenth-Century Black Literary Traditions

Special Destiny of the Negro

Deconstructing Race: Du Bois’s Challengers, Alexander Crummell, and James McCune Smith

Back to the Future

32 Speculative Realism and the Postrace Aesthetic in Contemporary American Fiction

A New Postrace Generation

The Meaning of “Postrace”

Percival Everett’s Erasure

The Appeal of Black Pathology

My Pafology

The Novel’s Postrace and Post-Postmodern Dilemma

The Multidimensional Protagonist

Sous Rature

The Postrace Aesthetic in a Post-Postmodern World

33 The New Life of the New Forms: American Literary Studies and the Digital Humanities

Electronic Imaginative Compositions

Analysis

Archives

Politics and Institutions

Conclusion: “The Lands to Be Welded Together”

Acknowledgments

Index

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This series offers comprehensive, newly written surveys of key periods and movements and certain major authors, in English literary culture and history. Extensive volumes provide new perspectives and positions on contexts and on canonical and post-canonical texts, orientating the beginning student in new fields of study and providing the experienced undergraduate and new graduate with current and new directions, as pioneered and developed by leading scholars in the field.

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This edition first published 2011

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A companion to American literary studies / edited by Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine.

p. cm.

 Includes bibliographical references and index.

 ISBN 978-1-4051-9881-3 (cloth)

 1. American literature–History and criticism. 2. Criticism–United States. I. Levander, Caroline Field, 1964– II. Levine, Robert S. (Robert Steven), 1953–

 PS25.C59 2011

 810.9–dc22

2011012207

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDFs 9781444343779; Wiley Online Library 9781444343809; ePub 9781444343786; Mobi: 9781444343793

In memory of George Dekker, Emory Elliott, and Jeffrey Richards

Notes on Contributors

Nancy Bentley is professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of The Ethnography of Manners (1995) and Frantic Panoramas: American Literature and Mass Culture, 1870–1920 (2009). She is currently working on a study of kinship and the novel in the Americas.

Michael Bérubé is the Paterno Family Professor in Literature and the director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at Pennsylvania State University. His most recent books are What’s Liberal about the Liberal Arts? (2006) and The Left at War (2009). He is also the editor of The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies (2004).

Anna Brickhouse is associate professor of English and American studies at the University of Virginia, and the author of Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere (2004). She is currently completing a book on stories of failed translation and mistranslation in the Americas.

Russ Castronovo is the Dorothy Draheim Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author of Fathering the Nation (1995), Necro Citizenship (2001), and Beautiful Democracy (2007), and the editor of several volumes, including The Oxford Handbook to Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2011).

Matt Cohen is associate professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a contributing editor at the Walt Whitman Archive and the author of The Networked Universe: Communicating in Early New England (2009).

James H. Cox is associate professor of English and the director of the Indigenous Studies Graduate Portfolio at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Muting White Noise: Native American and European American Novel Traditions (2006) and Literary Revolutions: American Indian Writers and Indigenous Mexico, 1920–1960 (forthcoming). He is also the coeditor of the journal Studies in American Indian Literatures.

Elizabeth Fenton is assistant professor of English at the University of Vermont. She is the author of Religious Liberties: Anti-Catholicism and Liberal Democracy in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture (2011).

Shelley Fisher Fishkin is the Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities, professor of English, and director of American Studies at Stanford University. She is the author, editor, or coeditor of over 40 books on American literature and culture, most recently the Library of America’s The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works (2010). She is a founding editor of The Journal of Transnational American Studies.

Jennifer L. Fleissner is associate professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author of Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism (2004) and of essays in such journals as Critical Inquiry, ELH, American Literary History, American Literature, and Novel.

Paul Giles is Challis Professor of English at the University of Sydney, Australia. His most recent books are Transnationalism in Practice: Essays on American Studies, Literature and Religion (2010) and The Global Remapping of American Literature (2011).

Susan Gillman teaches world literature and cultural studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain’s America (1989) and Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (2003), and coeditor (with Russ Castronovo) of States of Emergency: The Object of American Studies (2009). She is currently completing a project on adaptation and translation in the Americas context titled “Our Mediterranean: American Adaptations, 1890–1975.”

Paul Gilmore is professor of English at California State University, Long Beach, and the author of The Genuine Article: Race, Mass Culture, and American Literary Manhood (2001) and Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism (2009). His articles have appeared in American Literature, ELH, MLQ, Early American Literature, and other journals and books.

Sean X. Goudie is associate professor of English at Pennsylvania State University and author of Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic (2006), which was awarded the 2007 Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book. His current book project examines how the “Caribbean American region” became a primary locus for US empire building in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Goudie is the director of Penn State’s Center for American Literary Studies (CALS), which recently hosted the inaugural conference of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists.

Kirsten Silva Gruesz is professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing (2001) and numerous essays on nineteenth-century print culture in English and Spanish. She is currently completing a book on the cultural history of Spanish usage in the United States.

George B. Handley is professor of humanities at Brigham Young University. He is the author of Postslavery Literatures in the Americas (2000) and New World Poetics (2007), and coeditor of Caribbean Literature and the Environment (2006) and Postcolonial Ecologies (2010). His articles have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, Mississippi Quarterly, Callaloo, American Literature, and other journals and volumes.

Ursula K. Heise is professor of English and director of the Program in Modern Thought & Literature at Stanford University. Her major academic interests focus on environmental culture, literature and art in the Americas and Western Europe, and theories of modernization, postmodernization, and globalization. She is the author of Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism (1997); Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (2008); and Nach der Natur: Das Artensterben und die moderne Kultur (2010). She is working on an English version of Nach der Natur called Cultures of Extinction, and a new project provisionally titled “The Avantgarde and the Forms of Nature.”

Gavin Jones is professor of English at Stanford University. His books include Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America (1999); American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840–1945 (2008); and an edition of Sylvester Judd’s 1845 novel Margaret (2009).

Catherine Gunther Kodat is professor of English and American Studies at Hamilton College. She has published widely on US literature, music, dance, and film in journals such as American Literary History, American Quarterly, Boston Review, and Representations. During the 1980s, she was the dance critic for The Baltimore Sun.

Caroline F. Levander is Carlson Professor of Humanities, professor of English, and Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Initiatives at Rice University. She is the author of Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Culture and Literature (1998) and Cradle of Liberty: Race, the Child and National Belonging from Thomas Jefferson to W.E.B. Du Bois (2006), and the coeditor of several volumes, including Teaching and Studying the Americas (2010).

Robert S. Levine is professor of English and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he is the director of the Center for Literary and Comparative Studies. He is the author of Conspiracy and Romance (1989), Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity (1997), and Dislocating Race and Nation (2008), and the editor of a number of volumes, including Hemispheric American Studies (coedited with Caroline F. Levander). He is the new general editor of The Norton Anthology of American Literature.

Mary Loeffelholz is professor of English and vice provost for academic affairs at Northeastern University. She is the author of Dickinson and the Boundaries of Feminist Theory (1991) and From School to Salon: Reading Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry (2004); and her essays have appeared in American Literary History, English Literary History, The New England Quarterly, The Yale Journal of Criticism, and Studies in Romanticism, among other venues. She edited Studies in American Fiction from 1991 to 2008, and she is currently the editor of The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume D, 1914–1945.

Christopher Looby is professor of English at UCLA and president of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. The author of Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States (1996), he has also published The Complete Civil War Journal and Selected Letters of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1999) and prepared an edition of Robert Montgomery Bird’s 1836 novel Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself (2008). He is currently working on a book called “The Sentiment of Sex.”

Colleen Lye is associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches courses in American literature, Asian American Studies, and Critical Theory. She is the author of America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893–1945 (2005), and coeditor with Christopher Bush of Forms of Asia, a special issue of Representations published in 2007.

John T. Matthews is professor of English at Boston University. He is the author of The Play of Faulkner’s Language (1982), The Sound and the Fury: Faulkner and the Lost Cause (1991), and William Faulkner: Seeing through the South (2009). He has written essays on a variety of other topics in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and British literature, and is the editor of Wiley-Blackwell’s A Companion to the Modern American Novel, 1900–1950 (2009).

Dana D. Nelson is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University, where she teaches literature and American Studies. Her most recent book is Bad for Democracy: How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People (2008). In her new book project, “Ugly Democracy,” she examines alternative democratic cultures and practices in the early nation, with an interest in their legacy and the possibilities they provide to democratic practice today.

Kirsten Ostherr is associate professor of English at Rice University, where she teaches courses in film and media studies and medical humanities. She is the author of Cinematic Prophylaxis: Globalization and Contagion in the Discourse of World Health (2005) and Medical Visions: Producing the Patient through Film, Television, and Imaging Technologies (forthcoming), as well as articles on public health films, science fiction, animation, and independent art cinema.

Carla L. Peterson is professor of English at the University of Maryland, and affiliate faculty of the Departments of Women’s Studies, American Studies, and African-American Studies. She is the author of The Determined Reader: Gender and Culture in the Novel from Napoleon to Victoria (1986); “Doers of the Word”: African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830–1880) (1995); and Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (2011). She has published numerous essays on nineteenth-century African American literature and culture.

Joel Pfister is Kenan Professor of the Humanities and chair of the Department of English at Wesleyan University. He has published six books, including The Production of Personal Life: Class, Gender, and the Psychological in Hawthorne’s Fiction (1991); Critique for What? Cultural Studies, American Studies, Left Studies (2006); and the coedited Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America (1997). He is completing a book on American literature from Franklin to the modernists.

Jeffrey H. Richards (1948–2011) was for many years Old Dominion University Eminent Professor of English. He is the author of Theater Enough: American Culture and the Metaphor of the World Stage, 1607–1789 (1991), Mercy Otis Warren (1995), and Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic (2005), and the editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of American Drama.

Mark Rifkin is assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is the author of Manifesting America: The Imperial Construction of U.S. National Space (2009) and When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty (2011). He also coedited Sexuality, Nationality, Indigeneity: Rethinking the State at the Intersection of Native American and Queer Studies (2010), a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.

Ramón Saldívar is the Hoagland Family Professor in Humanities and Sciences and professor of English at Stanford University. He is the author of several books, including Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (1990) and The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary (2006), which won the Modern Language Association Prize in 2007 for the best book in the area of US Latino/a and Chicana/o studies. Among his current projects is a book-length study titled “The TransAmerican Novel: Form, Race, and Narrative Theory in the Americas.”

Shirley Samuels is professor of English and American Studies at Cornell University. She is the author of Romances of the Republic (1996) and Facing America: Iconography and the Civil War (2004), and the editor of The Culture of Sentiment (1992) and Blackwell’s A Companion to American Fiction, 1780–1865 (2004).

Michelle Stephens is associate professor of English at Rutgers University. She is the author of Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914 to 1962 (2005) and a member of the Radical History Review Editorial Collective. She is currently at work on a manuscript entitled “Skin Acts: New World Black Male Performance and the Desire for Difference.” Her research and teaching interests include American, African American, Caribbean, and New World literatures; diaspora and cultural studies; black performance studies; and the intersections of race and psychoanalysis.

Elisa Tamarkin is associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (2008). She is currently working on a book titled “Irrelevance,” on the culture of the news and on ideas of relevant and irrelevant knowledge since 1830.

Brook Thomas is Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. He has published books on James Joyce and on the New Historicism, and three on law and literature: Cross-Examinations of Law and Literature: Cooper, Hawthorne, Stowe, and Melville (1987), American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract (1997), and Civic Myths: A Law and Literature Approach to Citizenship (2007). He has also edited a casebook on Plessy v. Ferguson (1997).

Priscilla Wald is professor of English and Women Studies at Duke University. She is the author of Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (1995) and Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (2008), and coeditor (with Michael Elliott) of The American Novel: 1870–1940 (2011), volume 6 of the Oxford History of the Novel in English. She is currently at work on a book-length study titled “Human Being after Genocide: Toward a Genomic Creation Myth.”

Introduction

Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine

Forms, spaces, practices – these are the key terms that this book adopts for conceptualizing the current state and future directions of American literary studies in the twenty-first century. No longer organized exclusively by author, time period, genre, or nation, American literary studies is developing new paradigms and models that revise many of our standing assumptions about literary practice, literary categories, literary production, and the field of inquiry itself. No longer viewing American literature as a canon to be curated or an archive to be recovered and preserved, Americanists increasingly regard their object of study as a dynamic, multimedia, hybrid textual corpus, deploying a wide array of interpretive strategies and methods that help us to reconceive what we thought we knew about the study of American literature. It is the very dynamism of the field at the present moment that the 33 essays comprising this volume collectively represent.

In this way, A Companion to American Literary Studies offers a key and timely point of departure from other recent American literary studies collections. A Companion to American Literature and Culture (Lauter), for example, offers genealogical essays on the history of the field, along with essays on the authors and subjects central to American literary study. Rather than mapping out the various fields and subfields of American literary studies (regionalism, ecocriticism, transcendentalism, and so on), our volume focuses on critical work that is helping to transform the field itself. Accordingly, we include in our Companion essays by newer and established scholars whose thinking addresses the most provocative questions, subjects, and issues animating American literary studies. The essays represent and respond to changes and reorientations in the field, engage the increasingly diverse conceptions of American literary study, and assess the unprecedented material changes occasioned by emerging digital, new media, and visual technologies. As a group, the essays provide readers with the knowledge and conceptual tools for understanding American literary studies as it is practiced today; a number of the essays also chart new directions for the field, pointing to future developments and possibilities. With its emphasis on a wide range of scholarly practices, the volume, we hope, can serve as an essential resource for anyone interested in the current state of American literary studies, as well as for anyone interested in the future of the field.

We undertake this collection because, at the present moment, the field of American literary studies finds itself at an exciting and potentially revolutionary point of transformation. Gender, race, ethnic, and women’s studies helped to transform the canon during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, and new developments in hemispheric, transatlantic, transnational, and postnational studies have raised questions about the very viability of American literary studies (see, for example, Davidson and Hatcher; Kaplan and Pease; Levander and Levine; Manning and Taylor; Rowe). Does it make sense to continue to regard the literature of the US nation as constituting, in Richard Poirier’s well-known formulation, “a world elsewhere”? Questions of race, gender, ethnicity, and nation are at the center of many essays in this collection, as are essays that focus on Native American literature, queer studies, disability studies, postcolonial reconceptions of “early American” literature, and the human sciences. There are surprises here, such as an essay on medical imaging, which links up with other essays in the volume on the increasing importance of biology, genetics, and machines to American literary studies. The new digital studies poses pressing questions about textuality, audience, and nation, as do various interdisciplinary approaches to American literature, whether the focus is on law, history, religion, politics, disability, gender and sexuality, and/or other intersecting disciplinary formations. Taken together, the essays in the volume help us to see how American literary history might be told in the light of a number of new approaches to the field. The essays also help us better understand the histories and workings of the new approaches themselves.

But even as the essays point to the future, they are profoundly dialectical, showing the continuing importance of the literary and the national to American literary studies. In essays by Joel Pfister, Shirley Samuels, and many others, the literary itself provides ways of thinking about critical method, or, to put this differently, the literary is seen as a form of critical practice. Virtually all of the essays in the volume have literary works at the center of their discussions, making it clear that even the newest approaches tend to be inflected by an intense interest in the literary. There has been much recent talk about a renewed interest in aesthetics in American literary and cultural studies (Elliott, Caton, Rhyne), and this volume suggests that considerations of literary complexity, artistry, and vision remain central to the challenge of doing American literary studies. Similarly, though a number of essays in the volume raise questions, implicitly or explicitly, about the limits of conceiving of American literary studies solely in terms of the US nation (see, for example, the essays by George Handley and by Susan Gillman and Kirsten Gruesz), the nation remains central to numerous essays in our volume, ranging from Elizabeth Fenton’s consideration of religion and American literature to the essays by Carla Peterson and Ramón Saldívar on African American literature and race. All of our contributors have moved beyond a literary-nationalist embrace of US exceptionalism, but that doesn’t mean that specific national histories – such as the role of millennialism in American thought, or the practice of slavery, or attitudes toward poverty in a supposedly classless nation – haven’t had an enormous impact on US literature. As the field of American literary studies becomes more globalized and comparative, the nation continues to exert its power (in all sorts of ways) as a category deserving of analysis. Essays in Part II of this volume, however, ask us to think about the nation in larger hemispheric, transatlantic, and global contexts.

We have organized the essays in A Companion to American Literary Studies around forms, spaces, and practices because these conceptual groupings work against the chronological and thematic analytic categories that often make up traditional literary histories. The essays in Part I, “Forms,” address aesthetic issues in a variety of ways, but generally take literary form as either their starting point or an integral concern; the essays in Part II, “Spaces,” focus their attention on geographies and temporalities in ways that raise questions about or revise our understanding of the national, or, better yet, the “American” in American literary studies. The essays in these two parts very centrally are also about literary practice; and the essays in “Spaces” in particular are about new ways of practicing American literary studies. Nevertheless, we have established a third grouping called “Practices” (Part III), guided by the idea that reconceived notions of literary forms and national, geographical, and temporal spaces are central to a number of what could be called the new and emerging subfields of American literary studies, such as law and literature, posthumanism, disability studies, and race studies. It is important to emphasize that our three conceptual sections are meant to highlight or foreground what we regard as the main emphases of the essays, and that we are well aware that our groupings are inevitably overlapping and palimpsestic. Even as we acknowledge that none of the essays can easily be contained within a single conceptual category, we find these categories illustrative of new perspectives in American literary scholarship on what constitutes the literary past, what generates the literary present, and what is possible for the future of the field.

Because of these shared interests, many of the essays produce provocative cross-talk between sections. Gender, for example, moves as a dynamic thread linking the nineteenth-century US novel (Samuels, “Forms”) to the worlds of color that become visible when we approach gender within a hemispheric system of meaning making (Stephens, “Spaces”). Approached from a transnational perspective, the labor dimension of gender systems gains a new legibility that resonates with our understanding of social inequality as represented in American literature (Jones, “Forms”). New mass culture modes of literary expression offer another powerful through-line connecting the three sections. Popular visualization techniques for disease (Ostherr, “Forms”), for example, function like and resonate with the unorthodox but deeply meaningful transnational text networks that Gillman and Gruesz sketch in “Spaces.” Within the larger context of these kinds of text networks – ranging across time, space, and narrative forms, and, as Bentley illustrates, being long consonant with mass media (“Forms”) – digital humanities can be seen as both an emergent mass culture phenomenon and a natural next iteration of a longstanding popular engagement with the disparate technologies of textual production (Cohen, “Practices”) and the disparate textual productions of technology (Gilmore, “Forms”). We could also note that the issues of performance that Kodat addresses in “Forms” resonate in virtually every essay in the volume, whether on genre (Richards and Loeffelholz, “Forms”), new Caribbean regionalisms (Goudie, “Spaces”), Native American studies (Rifkin and Cox, “Spaces”), democratic cultures (Nelson, “Practices”), or gender and sexuality (Samuels, “Forms”; Looby, “Practices”).

And yet, if the individual essays comprising the collection consistently resist, move across, and synergize our three conceptual groups, each section nevertheless has an internal cohesiveness and focus. In this respect, the essays in each section can be regarded as thought-experiments in key concepts central to how many scholars currently envision, teach, and critically interpret American literature.

For example, the first section purposefully revisits questions of aesthetics that have proven thorny over the years for Americanists. In his foundational and now somewhat dated The American Renaissance (1941), F.O. Matthiessen studies at great length what he terms “Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman,” while focusing on a limited canon of writers who are presented as having little to do with politics and popular culture. The essays grouped together in Part I, “Forms,” all share an exciting sense of the rich possibilities for rethinking art and expression in the wake of the canon expansion of the past several decades, which did much to unsettle fixed notions of the literary. Recent developments in performance studies and media studies have further expanded ideas of the literary, particularly in relation to form. Moreover, in response to the New Historicism, which worked with increasingly predictable models of subversion and containment, there has been a renewed interest in the power of the literary as well as in the complex and often mutually constitutive interplay between the literary and the cultural. Literary form has traditionally been thought of in relation to genre, but in this section our contributors address not only literary genres but also medical images, films, machines, and other extraliterary forms. In their considerations of form in various literary and cultural contexts, some of our contributors break down distinctions between the literary and social, exploring, for example, the close connections between social formations and literary formations (see, for example, Fenton on religion and Jones on class). Others insist on the sheer power of the literary (see Pfister in particular). With their interests in such matters as material culture, technology, popular culture, visual studies, and performance, the contributors in Part I offer fresh ways of thinking about art and expression and about the place of form, and form itself, in American literary studies. Overall, the essays in Part I can be understood as having a foundational place in our volume, reminding us of the importance of form, or art and expression, or the “literary” (however it is understood) to any critical foray into how we might think about or reconceive American literary studies.

Part I begins with Russ Castronovo on the politics of literary form. Focusing on the propagandistic poems of the early national writer Philip Freneau, Castronovo shows how difficult it is to separate form (and questions of aesthetics) from politics. In the essay’s boldest move, Castronovo urges critics and readers to consider form as content; and in crucial respects all of the essays in Part I exemplify and put into practice the sort of literary-historical and critical work that Castronovo calls for. Joel Pfister, for instance, reads Franklin, Hawthorne, and other American writers as in effect doing their own historicist and critical work when writing about capitalism and alienation. Thus, in a somewhat Emersonian mode, Pfister insists on the importance of creative reading to Americanist scholarship. Similarly, Shirley Samuels, in her discussion of popular women’s novels of the mid-nineteenth century, illuminates how the tropes, figures, and concerns of the sentimental novel, indeed the very form of the sentimental novel, is the content, arguing that women writers of the time can be viewed as the historians and theorists who laid the groundwork for the feminist literary historians of the late twentieth century. The next three essays in Part I examine the intimate connections between literary and cultural forms. Attending to the general neglect of religion in American literary studies, Elizabeth Fenton discusses literary and religious writings, including The Book of Mormon, that work with and against what she terms a “secularization narrative.” Paul Gilmore recuperates what could be termed a “technology narrative,” exploring interrelationships between technological developments and literary expression in ways that challenge conventional notions of the incompatibility of technology and art. Americanists have long affirmed the close connections between democracy and US literary traditions, but in an essay that focuses on what could be called a “poverty narrative,” Gavin Jones argues that class itself can be understood as a formal component of the American novel, crucial to representations of social space in works ranging from Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance to Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49.

Genre, performance, and the visual are crucial to the next four essays in Part I. Kirsten Ostherr discusses medical imaging as a genre of sorts – bounded in crucial ways by the body and available technologies while opening up new ways of thinking about the biocultural in a globalized US literature. Attending to the literary dimensions of such “extraliterary” forms as music and dance, Catherine Gunther Kodat points to the crucial role of performance both within and across literary genres, focusing on poetry and also helping us to reimagine ballet and music as part of a more expansive literary history in the twentieth-century United States. Jeffrey Richards and Mary Loeffelholz address genre as more traditionally understood, though performance remains crucial to their analyses as well. Richards’s study of theater from the colonial through the modern period examines the interconnections between social and dramatic performances, emphasizing how both are dependent on the visual (spectatorship). Loeffelholz notes the irony that popular US poetry has always been about the social and performative, but that poetry somehow continues to remain neglected by critics interested in cultural history. Why, she asks, is a poet like Longfellow, whose work was so widely disseminated in the culture, and so clearly informed by (even as it shaped) the culture, regularly neglected, along with a host of other popular poets? Like Castronovo, Loeffelholz suggests that considerations of form as content may help to revitalize the study of US poetry. The final two essays in Part I offer case histories of the importance of form to literary and cultural expression during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Fleissner takes up the American Romance, regarded ever since Richard Chase’s The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957) as that which defines the distinctiveness of American fiction. Engaging traditional and new theories of American literary history, and in particular circling back to reconsider earlier critics’ insights into romance, she offers, through a close reading of Melville’s Billy Budd, a theoretically reenergized reading of the historical, political, and psychological aspects of the “genre” of romance – a reading that ultimately raises questions about “the romance of progress” in American literary studies. Nancy Bentley’s historicist reading of form during approximately the same period reveals how turn-of-the-twentieth-century mass-media – such as newspapers, films, advertising, popular novels, and sound recordings – had enormous consequences for literary culture. In the manner of Ostherr, she identifies cognitive shifts brought about by the impact of mass media, especially the visual, which call for new modes of literary analysis.

Even as the collection attends to the “forms” constituting the literary of American literary studies, it simultaneously takes seriously the geographic designator “American.” In the last few decades, scholars have become increasingly engaged by the geographic containers that have historically been used to sort and make sense of seemingly disparate literary traditions. No longer used as an equivalent for the United States, the term “American” has come to signify the complex and overlapping geopolitical imperatives at work in a myriad of literary cultural formations. The spaces of the American literary landscape, on the one hand, gesture to the entire Americas as networks of civic, social, racial, and political affiliations that link parts of the United States with hemispheric partners like Cuba, Haiti, and Mexico and at times reach well beyond the hemisphere to Asia and Africa. On the other hand, these same spaces refer to the dense array of regional communities that constellate and often prove to be even more powerful for their members than, what is for some, a hypothetical or intangible affiliation with the US nation. The essays comprising Part II, “Spaces,” approach the “American” of American literary studies from multiple perspectives and with divergent practices. Collectively illustrating that there are no simple answers to the question “Where is American literature?”, the essays in this section offer various ways of addressing that misleadingly simple question.

Take, for example, Anna Brickhouse’s analysis of the relationship between Cabeza de Vaca and the little-known Lope de Oviedo. Through careful elucidation of the thus far unremarked relation between these two figures, Brickhouse charts a radical alternative to the literary origins story that scholars have recently been telling about the United States – an origins story that we have, as she points out, often with a sense of self-congratulation revised to include the erased significance of a figure like Cabeza de Vaca. Brickhouse challenges us to not simply add more texts to the canon of US literary culture, but more fundamentally to revisit the methods and critical assumptions we bring to the study of those texts. Gillman and Gruesz provide an important case study of how such a reconsideration of our critical assumptions and habits – our habituated impulse, for example, to read Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno within a national or Americas rather than a transatlantic frame – might generate rich new opportunities for understanding familiar texts like Melville’s novella of slave revolt. Arguing for a text-network approach to the study of individual authors and texts, Gillman and Gruesz relocate Melville’s novella within a framework that circulates from Europe to the Americas to Africa and back again. Refusing to firmly locate Benito Cereno within an American or US literary tradition, Gillman and Gruesz illustrate, opens up new interpretive possibilities for reading the transnational resonances and dialogues of which Melville was a key part. Like Gillman and Gruesz, Michelle Stephens reorients a founding fiction of American literary studies – in this case, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter – around a transnational scaffolding, exploring the worlds of color that become visible when we approach key themes of Hawthorne’s novel (labor, gender, and race) with an eye to hemispheric echoes and Americas-wide significance.

Just as Stephens takes up the full spectrum of geopolitical “spaces” with which a familiar author is concerned, the large-scale significance of transatlantic and transpacific studies in and for American literary studies is the focus of essays by Elisa Tamarkin and Shelley Fisher Fishkin. Tamarkin addresses the question of transatlanticism as a category of analysis, charting the myriad ways in which the fact of Atlantic crossings shapes literature, cultural history, and national belongings. Fishkin brings attention to the transpacific as well as hemispheric engagements of an author like Mark Twain, showing how Twain resonates for Chinese writers and scholars as well as for famous Cuban writers like José Martí. Further, she explores how this unacknowledged dimension of Twain’s literary significance reorients what we think we know about a familiar literary figure – a figure that readers have historically equated with US literary heritage and nation-based social commentaries.

While many of the essays in “Spaces” gesture beyond the boundaries of the US nation, a number attend to the complex variations within the United States and between US regions and other regions of the Americas. John Matthews provides a nuanced and layered analysis of US Southern literary studies, at once acknowledging the field’s longstanding focus on the US South as a distinctive region within the United States and exploring Southern literary studies’ attentiveness to how this region connects with its southern neighbors – how the US South is part of a trans­national, even global southern community with a shared history of slave owning, abolition, and colonialism, to name only a few examples. The interlocking literary histories that embed US writers known for their regionally focused writing (like Cormac McCarthy for the US-Mexico borderland or Sarah Orne Jewett for New England local color) are the focus of Sean Goudie’s and George Handley’s contributions. Taking what we assume to be distinctive regional traditions within the United States, like the US-Mexico borderlands and New England, and illustrating their dynamic engagement with places like the Caribbean and Mexico, both essays chart powerful networks of literary production occurring across as well as within regional and national spaces.

Relatedly, Mark Rifkin and James Cox ask us to think about the enduring presence of Native American traditions and cultural imaginaries in American literary studies. With an eye toward the complex affective legacy of Native American history for American literary production, Rifkin analyzes such disparate materials as Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and William Apess’s “Eulogy on King Philip,” suggesting that they offer us compelling examples of how Anglo-Americans envision Native peoples and settlement cultures. Cox asks us to approach tribal nation contexts from the perspective of American Indian writers. Focusing on three twentieth-century Cherokee Nation authors, Cox’s essay forms a dynamic dialogue with Rifkin’s, suggesting that regions within the United States have their own claims to nationhood that operate in creative as well as in political, social, and cultural tension with the US nation that surrounds them. Part II ends with a consideration, by Paul Giles, of the meaning and value of globalization for American literary studies. Tracking American literature’s longstanding engagement with globalization, Giles charts an American literary tradition that has been, to varying degrees, always already engaged in global thinking, perspectives, and concerns. From the nation’s origins stories to the hemispheric, transnational, and global networks in which American authors operate, the spaces of American literature, as the essays in this section suggest, are varied, ever changing, and intricately webbed across multiple geopolitical divides.

The “how” is as important to A Companion to American Literary Studies as the “what” and the “where” of the first two sections, respectively. And so the third section, “Practices,” explores the integration and implications of those topics outlined in “Forms” and “Spaces” with respect to how we undertake or do American literary studies. To repeat what we noted earlier in our introduction: all of the essays in Parts I and II are about practices as well, but the essays in Part III place an added emphasis on understanding crucial disciplinary fields or subfields, or overarching topics, integral to the larger project of American literary studies. Beginning this section is Dana Nelson’s analysis of arguably the core of US liberal democratic nationhood – the democratic practices that constitute federal order as well as the practices that contest and resist that order. Showing how American literature of the early national period emphasized the contention and disagreement dismissed by consensus narratives, Nelson illustrates how the practice of American democracy and the literary materials that helped to constitute, naturalize, and disseminate it to Americans were far from uniform or universally agreed upon. Brook Thomas carries this interest in democratic literary cultures into the realm of legal practices, charting American writers’ sustained interest in the law and discussing the consequences of that interest on literary form. Through considerations of authors ranging from Charles Brockden Brown to William Faulkner, Thomas reveals that the relationship between the practice of law and the practice of literature has been enduring as well as ever changing. Christopher Looby’s essay takes us from the public realm of the courtroom to the more private realm of sexuality, demonstrating that American writers have been engaged with sexual as well as with legal or democratic issues. Focusing on Sarah Orne Jewett’s “Martha’s Lady,” but addressing a number of other works as well, Looby persuasively illustrates that passionate romantic friendships, erotic ties between same-sex partners, and queer identities have been a constitutive rather than ancillary or secondary feature of the practice of American literature. In other words, sexual practice is literary practice, and vice versa.

Priscilla Wald, Ursula Heise, and Michael Bérubé, in powerfully complementary essays, observe the myriad ways in which the practices of literary production and representation are biological and biomedical as well as social and geopolitical. Attentive to interactions of living organisms and their physical environments, Wald charts how the fields of both genetics and ecology in the post-World War II period informed American authors’ depictions of the human condition. Human contingency and the uncertain survival of the human species riveted the attention of science fiction writers as well as bestselling novelists like Sloan Wilson, whose The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit limns the close connections between fears of nuclear annihilation and the enhanced cultural prominence of the nuclear family. Heise examines responses to the new technologies of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries that disorder accepted practices associated with being human. Observing that a posthuman imaginary emerges out of surging interest in questions surrounding human life, Heise explores how American literature grapples with the question of how and if we should practice “humanism” – that is, whether we should continue to regard humans as a species apart or if we should adopt posthuman perspectives that understand humans as one of many animal species. Bérubé explores how narrative and intellectual disability are mutually implicating forces in American literature, from William Faulkner to Maxine Hong Kingston to much science fiction writing. Indeed it is the nation’s commitment to transforming nineteenth-century European scientific studies of intellectual disability into a rationale for tracking the American people’s collective and individual progress that makes American literature such a rich site for exploring the challenges and opportunities that narrative affords disability studies. At stake in these three essays is nothing less than the interlocking practices of being human and human being.

Similar issues are at stake in the three essays in Part III focusing on race. Given the long history of slavery and white supremacy in the United States, it is not surprising that race and ethnicity remain absolutely key terms in American literary studies, though crucial questions remain about how to approach these terms as categories of analysis. For Colleen Lye, the transnationalization of frameworks for understanding Asian American racial, ethnic, and literary identities reveals that Asian Americanness has always been in crisis, existing as a sociohistorical construct much more than as an identity defined by biological descent. Drawing on recent theoretical work in Asian American studies, Lye proposes a nonlinear approach to Asian American literary history governed by fragmentation and disorderliness, and a clear-eyed skepticism about the stability of Asian American identity. Carla Peterson proposes a different sort of reorientation for nineteenth-century African American literary studies, urging critics to return to the archives in order to develop a more complex understanding of the historical genealogies of such concepts as race and diaspora. Challenging the binary that privileges Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois as the leaders who identified the social significance of these concepts at the turn into the twentieth century, Peterson underscores the importance of writings by the less well-known Alexander Crummell and James McCune Smith on black community and race. Crucially, Peterson identifies Smith as an intellectual who could be said, somewhat anachronistically, to have “deconstructed” race as a social construct, pointing the way to the postracial. Ramón Saldívar takes up what he calls “the postrace aesthetic” in recent writings by African Americans, showing how these writers may be some of our best current critics on matters of race. Saldívar’s essay, which speaks to the promises inherent in the election of Barack Obama to the presidency, begs the question of whether a postracial perspective, with its often wildly funny deconstructions of race, can trump the ravages of history and the persistence of whites’ antiblack racism.

The final essay of the collection comes full circle to questions of form and space and asks us to envision literary production within the context of the digital technologies that are transforming how we write, read, sort, and script American literature via the computer chip and Internet. From colonial writers to Walt Whitman to figures like Loss Pequeño Glazier and Mary-Anne Breeze, American authors have been consistently and enduringly fascinated with codes and technologies of literary expression. Challenging us to see digital modes of analysis and expression as part of a continuum, Matt Cohen reminds us that writers have always worked with form within the context of available technologies. Not an aesthetic pursuit separated from mass culture or technological innovation, American writing, as the contributors to this volume show, is built into the dense fabric of American life – its technologies, its playfulness, and its production of new ways of communicating the vitality of lived experience both within and beyond the nation.

Acknowledgments

We wish to express our warm thanks and appreciation to our editor at Wiley-Blackwell, Emma Bennett, who has been wonderfully helpful and supportive through every stage of the project. We are also grateful for the assistance of Wiley-Blackwell editors Bridget Jennings, Sue Leigh, and Cheryl Adam. We would also like to thank the proofreader, Helen Kemp, and indexer, Tim Penton. We are happy to acknowledge material assistance from the Departments of English at Rice University and the University of Maryland; and most of all we would like to thank our contributors for their engaging essays and collegiality.

Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine

References and Further Reading

Chase, Richard. The American Novel and Its Tradition. New York: Anchor Books, 1957.

Davidson, Cathy N., and Jessamyn Hatcher. Eds. No More Separate Spheres! A Next Wave American Studies Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.

Elliott, Emory, Louis Freitas Caton, andJeffrey Rhyne. Eds. Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Kaplan, Amy, and Donald E. Pease. Eds. Cultures of United States Imperialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.

Lauter, Paul. Ed. A Companion to American Litera­ture and Culture. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

Levander, Caroline F., and Robert S. Levine. Eds. Hemispheric American Studies. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008.

Manning, Susan, and Andrew Taylor. Eds. Transatlantic Literary Studies: A Reader. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.

Matthiessen, F.O. Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. 1941. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.

Poirier, Richard. A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966.

Rowe, John Carlos. Ed. Post-Nationalist American Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

Part I: Forms

1

Poetry, Prose, and the Politics of Literary Form

Russ Castronovo

The Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, and Martin Luther King’s Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech all exhibit poetic features in phrasing and cadence, but none is poetry. They are prose documents and it seems unlikely that their authors ever considered framing these great political statements as sonnets or sestinas. John Reed, best known for his journalistic tour de force of the October Revolution in Russia, wrote his fair share of sonnets, but few, if any, of his poems give off revolutionary sparks, whether as a matter of content or as formal experimentation. It is not that poetry is unsuited to politics – witness antislavery verse of the 1840s and 1850s or the poetry of the cultural left of the 1930s – but neither are odes to specific pieces of legislation common literary fare. And yet, when poetry does become outfitted for political purposes, the most significant work may be done not in terms of content but in terms of form.

This chapter seeks to unsettle such misleading oppositions about the supposedly conventional nature of poetic form versus the socially relevant and political possi­bilities of prose. In no less a defining statement than What Is Literature? (1948), Jean-Paul Sartre contrasted the prose writer, who uses words as tools for getting things done in the world, with the poet whose abstruse relation to language makes for compositions whose usefulness is puzzling at best. “Poets are men who refuse to utilize language,” writes Sartre (5). Poetry appears to Sartre an insular and reflexive métier, one that makes it seem as if the poet “did not share the human condition” (6). In this view, poetry – by its very nature – seems esoteric, removed from the public and collective settings that provide a necessary condition for politics. Although Theodor Adorno would counter that this emphasis upon worldly engagement forces literature into acceptance of the world as it is, the basic assumptions of Sartre’s view are reflected in certain implicit tendencies within American literary studies. Ever since the cultural turn in literary criticism emphasizing the historical and material contexts of writing, the field has prioritized prose, especially the novel, over poetry as though verse were somehow inadequate to representing political crisis. Never mind that writers as diverse as Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frances Harper, Walt Whitman, Claude McKay, and Margaret Atwood have taken up poetry and prose with equal facility. Never mind that for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, poetry written by such luminaries as Philip Freneau, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Lydia Sigourney enjoyed a popularity that often rivaled, if not surpassed, that of novels.

To make these points is not to intone a dirge for 1950s-style formalism or even for poetry. Rather, it is to consider how aesthetic choices become political choices, how opting for either poetry or prose itself constitutes a commentary on the social world and its attendant conventions and forms. Of course, it would seem that in some situations there is no choice at all. Opinions on taxes or the treatment of prison inmates demand everyday expression associated with prose. Philip Freneau, a poet of the American Revolution, did not give into these demands, and such poems as his “Occasioned by a Legislation Bill Proposing a Taxation upon Newspapers” and “On a Legislative Act Prohibiting the Use of Spirituous Liquors to Prisons in Certain Jails of the United States” would seem to test not only the distinctions between poetry and prose but also the assumptions about the politics conveyed by each form. While titles such as “The Wild Honey Suckle” or “To a Caty-Did” reveal that Freneau composed verses on traditional lyric subjects, he also wrote poems on a range of nonpoetic subjects in order to express political views beyond the limits of prosaic wisdom. To be sure, Freneau appears in most anthologies of American literature, but he does so only as a poet. The effect of ignoring his prose is significant, not because his essays and newspaper articles have any special significance themselves, but because Freneau’s ability to work in both forms, in tandem with his lifelong indecision about, changing attitudes toward, and strategic deployments of each, suggests something about the nimbleness that political engagement requires. His occasional but sporadic reflections on prose and poetry – What does it mean to frame an appeal in verse? Is prose somehow more democratic than poetry? In the world of public opinion, is poetry an inherently oppositional form? Is prose an accommodation to the world as it is? – offer something like a theory of political form.

Examining the work of this revolutionary-era writer thus supplies much more than a new perspective on the boundaries of eighteenth-century discourse; returning to this “lost” American poet enables a broader consideration about forms of expression within democratic public spheres. Or, as Freneau rhymed near the end of his life, “A poet where there is no king / Is but a disregarded thing,” bemoaning that the imaginative, creative qualities associated with poetics seemingly have no place in American democracy (Last Poems 31). His lament remains an instructive provocation to examine how literary form – such as the choice of poetry or prose – engages the nature and meaning of politics at a vital level. This focus on form opens out into a reconsideration of the relationship of literature to propaganda, of art to popular culture, and of aesthetics to oppositional politics, and other issues central to American literary study in the twenty-first century. If Freneau’s placement in anthologies suggests that he is a writer who is supposed to help us make sense of national literary traditions, then this renewed attention to the productive tensions between his poetry and prose offers a perspective for reevaluating how form has played an often uncertain but no less determining role in creating the political valences of American literature.

Before undertaking this investigation, a few remarks are necessary to set some parameters about the terms prose, poetry, and politics