The Fabrication of American Literature: Fraudulence and Antebellum Print Culture by Lara Langer Cohen (review)

Incidents of “subterfuge, impostures, and plagiarism” serve as the rich source material for Lara Langer Cohen’s fascinating analysis of antebellum print culture. The Fabrication of American Literature unearths what Cohen calls “a paradox at the heart of American literary history”: within the context of the nation’s most vehement declarations of literary independence from Britain, readers, critics, and writers expressed a growing uneasiness about the veracity of American literature. Cohen argues that “controversies of literary fraud plagued the period,” typified by comparisons between the nation’s fictional output and “inflated currency, land bubbles, and quack medicines” (1). American literature appeared to some critics to be fabricated, both in the sense of being “a project under active construction” as well as a product “that struck many as fundamentally false” (1). In the process of establishing a firm sense of what made American literature American, writers hoisted antebellum fiction onto a pedestal of “overexposure and overextension” that seemed perilously close to “spectacle” and, as such, perilously close to the “humbug” that P. T. Barnum infamously celebrated during the same era (15). Ironically, though, the “problem of fraudulence” that loomed over the nation’s literary efforts “offered its own kind of rhetorical solution” (15-16). Even as critics and authors fretted that the successful production of American literature was due, in part, to different forms of fabrication, those very charges of inauthenticity helped to “establish that entity we now confidently call American literature” (16).

Following its Introduction, the book offers four case studies illuminating how the tensions between fabrication and authenticity functioned in print. Chapter one places antebellum literary nationalism into conversation with a system of literary “puffery” that proliferated between the 1830s and 1850s. Over-enthusiastic reviews and effusive praise for the nation’s writers suggested that literature was propped up by “underhanded promotional tactics,” or uncritical “puffs” (19). Edgar Allan Poe serves as the key figure of this chapter, and Cohen suggests that his narrative hoaxes—like the 1835 story “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall”—epitomized anxieties about the intellectual and cultural emptiness embodied in puffery.

Cohen turns, in chapter two, to “the strange careers of Davy Crockett and Jim Crow,” whose textual lives intersected in the early nineteenth century—Crockett appeared repeatedly in minstrel shows, and Jim Crow figured frequently in tall tales about Crockett. Both personalities offered attractive source material for critics, who valorized them as “evidence of a genuine native literary spirit,” characters from a vernacular literary discourse that reinforced the nation’s fictional independence (20). Despite—or even because of—their alterity, figures from the frontier and from the minstrel tradition were cast “as both inherently authentic and innately fraudulent, as both central to national literary culture and tangential to it” (102). Crockett and Crow pivoted around the seemingly contradictory “idea that alterity was prone to fakeness” but that it nevertheless could “provide the authentic American literature that literary nationalism failed to produce” (20).

Chapter three extends the discussion of authenticity and racial “theater” through the pseudo-slave narrative. This genre, which passed off entirely falsified and fabricated accounts of escaped slaves as true stories, underlines how “the problem of imposture was closely and often confoundingly tied up with the anti-slavery movement” (102). Abolitionists recognized the persuasive potential of narratives written by former slaves, but feared how their efforts could be undermined by accounts that only appeared authentic. They were, that is, compelled to embrace slave narratives, but the possibility of inauthenticity was an ongoing concern. Inauthentic narratives did in fact appear, including Richard Hildreth’s The Slave: or Memoirs of Archy Moore (1836), Mattie Griffith’s Autobiography of a Female Slave (1856), and the Narrative of James Williams (1838), arguably the only pseudo-slave narrative written by an African American. While white readers embraced Hildreth’s and Griffith’s books even after their provenance came to light, once Williams’s book was exposed as fraudulent, racist readers ironically...