- Early-19th-Century Literature
With the exception of Stowe, who continues to attract scholarly attention (this year with a major collection of essays), 2006 marks a curious turn away from major writers and toward transnationalism and hybridity, making it increasingly diffic ult to draw boundaries. While interest in particular African American writers is conspicuously muted, the topics of race and slavery figure prominently, and one of the most exciting developments is a trend toward reading Native American writers within a larger American literary context, making scholarship in this area especially strong.
i Period Studies
Efforts to understand American literature within a global context again constitute a dominant strain of American literary studies. One of the more historically detailed attempts to chart a more global cultural history can be found in Timothy Marr’s interesting book The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism (Cambridge). Noting that “Americans have long pressed orientalist images of Islam into domestic service as a means to globalize the authority of the cultural power of the United States,” Marr traces that use back to the earliest years of European settlement in the New World. His documentation is varied and far-reaching, offering “a critical history of cultural imagination” indebted to Edward Said and [End Page 221] Pierre Bourdieu. Noting that the American empire gained ascendancy as the Ottoman Empire declined, Marr demonstrates how Americans drew on images of Islam in order to “orient . . . the direction of their national project, the morality of their social institutions, the shape of their romantic imaginations, and other important aspects of cultural work and play.” While cultural images of Islam often, predictably, opposed the qualities claimed by Americans in their bids for moral legitimacy, this was not always the case, particularly following increasing opportunities for American contact with Islamic cultures after the 1830s. Marr’s interesting chapters on reform indicate how various the uses of Islamicism were in the first half of the century. These reformers, seeking to establish the global relevance of their efforts, drew on “Islamicism’s utility as a transhemispheric dimension.” Marr’s diverse sources include political cartoons, poems, pamphlets, political speeches, religious literature, travel writing, and Melville’s fiction. Marr makes a persuasive case that Islam occupied the imagination of Americans from colonial days to the American Civil War, where his study ends.
Another interesting study of globalism and empire building comes from a British Romanticist. Tim Fulford’s Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Literature, and Transatlantic Culture, 1756–1830 (Oxford) charts the figurative power of Romanticism as a “historical phenomenon that arose from, and addressed itself to, an encounter with the foreign.” Using a rich array of British and American archival material, including philosophy, history, travel narratives, and the autobiographical accounts of American Indians of mixed ancestry, as well as more familiar sources from the Romantic tradition, Fulford examines the construction of the Indian as a figuratively complex creature, primitively noble in the Enlightenment imagination and later appearing both more brutal and more fully human. Fulford’s early chapters recount the complicated history of colonial interaction between Britons, colonists, and Native Americans (a category itself remarkably mixed, including people of mixed race and whites who had been raised from an early age as Indians). The hybrid and global culture Fulford formulates weaves together Scottish nationalism, colonial subjugation, cultural masquerade, frontier conflicts, assimilation, political power, and the Romantic imagination, and reveals Romanticism as a discourse that not only threatened Indians but also offered a means to resist imperialism.
Also warranting mention in the context of this expanded global approach to American literary studies is John-Michael Rivera’s The [End Page 222] Emergence of Mexican America: Recovering Stories of Mexican Peoplehood in U.S. Culture (NYU). Rivera argues that many Mexican narratives enabled their authors to “enter the public sphere and transform the very contours of democratic culture” that had excluded them. Rivera discusses Lorenzo de Zavala’s 1834 narrative of his journey to the United States, “one of the first theoretical and ethnographic examinations of democracy as a political and cultural institution,” and considers the way popular American magazines of the 1840s circulated stories of Mexicans and presided over a discourse of Manifest Destiny. For Rivera...