Imagining Authorship in America: "Whose American Renaissance?" Revisited

The Transformation of Authorship in America By Grantland S. Rice. University of Chicago Press, 1997

Figuring Authorship in Antebellum America By Michael Newbury. Stanford University Press, 1997

The Tutor'd Mind: Indian Missionary-Writers in Antebellum America By Bernd C. Peyer. University of Massachusetts Press, 1997

Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity By Robert S. Levine. University of North Carolina Press, 1997

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More than a decade has passed since Frederick Crews pub lished his landmark lambasting of a group of critics he called "New Americanists" in the twenty-fifth anniversary issue of the New York Review of Books. Whether we then viewed the essay as peevish or perceptive (or a bit of both), we can see now, historically speaking, that its appearance was one of a series of events--the founding of American Literary History the following year was, of course, another--that contributed significantly to the theoretical transformation and institutional development of contemporary American literary criticism. Crews set himself up in vehement opposition to an impressive but still coalescing body of criticism--for at least one of the critics he attacked Crews became the movement's paradigmatic, reactionary villain--and by opposing it gave it coherence and, in particular, a name. ¹

So successful has been the transformation of Americanist literary criticism that today the New Americanists can only be said to be new in the same way that the New Critics are. Which is to say, in name only--in the name Crews, with a nod toward New Historicism, bequeathed them. (Just as the Puritans were so called by their detractors, so were the New Americanists.) Many of their assertions are our assumptions; what seemed radical and threatening then (at least to Crews) is ordinary now. Our contexts and canons have been revised. And, we should recall, Crews expected no less. "The truth is that," he wrote at the close of his essay, "for any works written before the last seventy years or so, the most influential academics get to decide who's in and who's out. And the New Americanists themselves seem destined to become the next establishment in their field. They will be right about the most important books and the most fruitful ways of studying them because, as they always knew in their leaner days, those who hold power are right by definition" ("Whose" 81). Some of us may prefer a less cynical analysis of the transformation; some may even prefer to say that the forces of light have beaten back the forces of darkness. Its cynicism and our arrogance aside, however, Crews's prediction has proven to be right on the mark. And I return to Crews's critique now not because I want to launch a recidivist and revanchist assault on New Americanist institutions, but precisely because the war is over--it is arguably (to use Sacvan Bercovitch's term) a "time of dissensus" (Rites 353). Or, to underscore the irony in Bercovitch's coinage, the dissensus has become the consensus, one sign of which is the appearance over the last decade of such taking-stock volumes as Bercovitch's own multivolume Cambridge History of American Literature (1993-). Another sign may be seen in the volumes under review, all of which comfortably build on--and, in the antebellum sense, improve--the territory that was Crews's battlefield.

I return to Crews's jeremiad then, now that the dust has cleared, to see how Americanist criticism has proceeded, to see if what most bothered Crews about the assertions of the New Americanists has in any way been addressed in this recent criticism. As is no doubt familiar, the revisionist assertions (and Crews's complaints) fall into two complementary categories (F. O. Matthiessen might have called them method and scope), each adumbrated in a session held at the English Institute in 1982-83 and in a volume from that session that Crews himself reviewed. The first was...