Themes, Topics, Criticism

As will be clear from this essay, it becomes increasingly difficult to discuss American literary history outside the context of identity. Work on "minority" writers and traditions continues apace, as contributions by Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Arlene Keizer, and others discussed here demonstrate, and the conjunction between identity and American literary history becomes more pronounced and widespread because of the interrogation of the term American. Clearly work in the vein of the new American studies has made thinking about the term beyond the geographical borders of the United States almost mandatory: studies by such scholars as Anna Brickhouse illuminate the difficulty of isolating the literature of the United States from the literatures of Central and South America and the Caribbean. To the extent that such an isolation is problematic, remedying it means thinking about American literature outside a strictly Anglophone context. However, to think in this way brings with it several complications, not the least of which is that such a scholarly focus necessarily expands the range of cultural knowledge required for an informed appreciation of newly recognized relations between national languages and literatures. Further, as Elaine Jahner's work suggests, the comparative dimension elicited by a more international focus might well be applied to different language traditions within the boundaries of the United States, and especially the literatures of indigenous people. So it would be a mistake to imagine that the interrogation of "American" results only from an appreciation of other national languages, literatures, or cultures. As evidenced by the books by Jennifer Fleissner and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, research into American literature also invites a refiguring of American identity in relation to gender. If, following Paul Gilroy's emendation of a famous Stuart Hall formulation, gender is the modality in which identity is performed, then it stands to reason that national identity is implicated in gender identity, and vice versa. But more important to this consideration might be the questions, What do the words used to signify gender difference really mean? If they are signs, what are their referents and what are the cultural contexts for both sign and referent?

Thinking about the varieties of identity and the different questions surrounding it ensures a discussion of what constitutes the nature of the public sphere. This year's scholarly work implicitly and explicitly concerns literature's relation to the communal values associated with American at different times in the nation's history. The interaction between multiple private identities and plural collective formations constitutes the dominant subject this year.

i Histories

Jennifer Fleissner's Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism (Chicago) revisits a familiar site in American literary history to reconceptualize that site's relation to gender. In this case the destination is literary naturalism, once thought the masculine province of Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, and others. Much has been done in recent memory to revise consideration of naturalism, particularly in the wake of New Historicism. Fleissner reads male and female writers against each other—Crane, Norris, and Dreiser versus Sarah Orne Jewett, Edith Wharton, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. She also reads naturalism, realism, and regionalism as "genres" against one another. Thinking about gender relative to this period unpacks naturalism's apparent emphasis on the absence of human freedom and sets out for critical examination the distinctions between historically accepted genres. Just as Dillon (see below) reads liberalism as "producing" gender, Fleissner represents naturalism as advancing agency more than previously thought.

Committed to refiguring the conjunction between early-20th-century literature and the idea of the nation, Michael Soto's The Modernist Nation: Generation, Renaissance, and Twentieth-Century American Literature (Alabama) covers writers as apparently different as Edgar Allan Poe and Amiri Baraka, Walt Whitman and T. S. Eliot, and other familiar names. The volume's historical span is impressive, ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson to James Baldwin. In this work, Soto represents the figure of a complex rebirth as a sign for literary history. Since "cultural emergence is an ongoing feature of American life," it stands to reason that literary history might well emulate this pattern. One of Soto's contributions is...