Editor’s Introduction

This special issue of American Literary History (ALH) addresses a question that seldom generates formal consideration: the ways and purposes of the major research project that comprises a scholar’s second book. Now that the profession has moved into digital forms of scholarly creativity, this convention may soon no longer be as obdurate as it once was, but the need for evaluating a scholar’s continued productivity will very likely remain, though the norms of awarding tenure, and the system it underwrites, are also under a challenge that we cannot ignore. Still, most entry-level assistant professors and advanced graduate students, not to mention newly tenured professors, should find it worthwhile to reflect on the current expectation and rationale. At the same time, professors who have completed their second books recently or long ago may also be interested in thinking through what this practice signifies, how and whether it has changed, and what second books say about our field.

To pursue that goal, I invited 16 Americanists in various stages of completing such a project both to ponder the challenges within their specialties and to point to new efforts at creating a contemporary historiography of American literature. In covering a suitable breadth of interests, any journal’s efforts at inclusivity inevitably fall short of meeting an ideal range of representation. Yet I trust the examples brought forward in this issue construct a kind of prism that helps to do justice to the nuances and complexities of the various subfields within ALH’s purview. Insofar as this issue also marks our 25th anniversary, collocating these essays furthers the journal’s abiding effort to represent for the profession at large what happens throughout American literary studies, so that specialists might expect to find important new contributions, while others could read about what was engaging specialists elsewhere to get a clearer and perhaps a more comprehensive understanding of subfields beyond their own. And ALH has always tried to put those advances and interventions in dynamic interplay.

In that same vein, the descriptions of the endeavors that follow, arranged in loose chronology, offer the occasion to consider the vitalizing diversity characterizing American literary historiography today, even as they also proffer a sense of what should be of interest in the very near future. Some of them may well become the books that help to define the developments characterizing their field, and perhaps a few will contribute to an even larger critical conversation. Moreover, two senior scholars, Elizabeth Renker and John Carlos Rowe, conclude the proceedings by deliberating over these projects’ combined vision and giving some wider perspective and deeper insight into their collective statement about both the current state and the emerging visions within the field.

In creating this collectivity, I asked the contributors to resist the pleasures of close reading, for a couple of reasons. First, because it was the authors’ premises and purposes that were the central feature of their statements, I urged them to imagine their papers as preliminary versions of the introductions to their books, a condition to which they very gamely agreed. Since most of us probably write introductions last, it was probably harder for them to give up the chance to show how their argument worked and explain instead what critical or scholarly opportunity they discerned, what problem or felt lack they wished to address, what consequences they aimed to provoke. Plus, I also had to worry about space, since the issue probably could not accommodate the demand necessitated by the subtle, detailed analyses that our contributors are so capable of producing. And, for the smallest part, it was a matter of time, since many of these papers originated in symposia held at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (2011–12), where participants had their papers vetted by the critically alert community of colleagues and students whose energetic reception often urged the symposiasts to see their works-in-progress in a different proportion or an unexpected light.

The proposition that if we want to glimpse what’s coming in the field we should attend to soon-to-be-completed second books may be sensible enough. Yet it also seemed to...