Foreword

This is the tenth volume of American Literary Scholarship I’ve edited since 1995. In many ways the task has become easier over time thanks to the extraordinary dedication of the contributors and the development of new technologies, especially the Internet and access to the online MLA Bibliography. Yet over these past few years I’ve also discovered to my dismay that training in basic research skills—a skill set acquired by all contributors to AmLS—is increasingly neglected in graduate programs in English. The old “boot camp” bibliography course for new grad students has been replaced over the past generation in many cases by a seminar on theory. But a course on theory should not preclude and certainly does not replace a rigorous introduction to hands-on research in a library. Not all significant scholarship, particularly books and essays published a generation or two or three ago, are available via Proquest or Project Muse. Not all important primary texts are available online via Google Books or the American Periodical Series.

Put another way: During finals week in spring 2006, an arsonist set fire to the stacks in the basement of the University of New Mexico library. The basement was closed for nearly two years for remodeling, for repair of the volumes not irrevocably damaged either by fire or water, and for installation of a system of chemical fire suppressants. Meanwhile, an astronomer across campus, interviewed by the local newspaper, reassured state taxpayers that the loss was unimportant, that “no one uses libraries anymore.” As one who uses a library almost every day, I beg to differ. So far as I’m concerned, the happiest places on earth are the main reading rooms of the American Antiquarian Society, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the Bancroft Library at UC-Berkeley, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and dozens of other places where I’m required to wash my hands to enter and where ink pens and cell phones are not allowed.

Or put yet another way: Fred Lewis Pattee and Jay Hubbell were not somehow less intelligent than scholars today, and their books and articles, no matter how unfashionable, still deserve to be read. Critics are wrong (a term that should be rehabilitated in literary scholarship) when they assert, for example, that a Jungian reading of Jack London is obsolete. The paradigm shifts in literary studies do not discredit prior scholarship like paradigm shifts in physics. Literary study today is a more challenging discipline than ever before because it is widening, not narrowing. With an expanding canon and a contracting job market, literary scholars today need to know more than ever, both the traditional and the new, and the annual volumes of AmLS are teaching tools designed precisely for that purpose.

The caliber of its contributors has always been a measure of its vitality. Joining the roster this year are Karen Roggenkamp (“Hawthorne”), John Bird (“Mark Twain”), and Drew Lopenzina (“Literature to 1800”). Welcome to them all, and long may they serve. Retiring after this year are William Rossi (“Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Transcendentalism”), Ted Atkinson (“Faulkner”), Frank J. Kearful (“Poetry: The 1940s to the Present”), and Matthew Hofer (“Eliot”). Kudos to them all.

Professor Nordloh and I appreciate the assistance and resources provided to us by Indiana University and the University of New Mexico. Thanks, too, to Terri Fizer, Jailyn Moreland, Laura Branton, and their colleagues at Duke University Press in supervising the production of this volume. Authors and publishers can help assure the thoroughness of AmLS coverage by directing offprints and review copies to Professor Nordloh at 495 Lake Dornoch Drive, Pinehurst, NC 28374.