Prospects for the Study of American Literature (II) (review)

Prospects (II) hearkens back to Resources for American Literary Study, a print reference series common to college and university libraries and some personal scholarly shelves, launched in 1994. Prospects (I) appeared in 1997. Along with American Literary Scholarship, Prospects was intended, as its editor Richard Kopley writes in the introduction to number II, "to inform and to provoke, and thus to move the field of American literary study ahead" (xv). But, to be in print in the age of Kindle and the iPad, JSTOR and eBooks, is to be, by definition, not ahead but behind. In fact, the fifteen bibliographic essays in Prospects (II) were written as early as 2004 and editorially digested for five years until publication in 2009. Even in academia, a lot can happen in five years. And, with the Kindle priced at about $139 (the iPad 2 starts at $499), the selling price of just this single print book is a considerable way toward the new technology. Maybe this is not so much a review as a eulogy.

Prospects (II) cannot help but feel dated, as if one were seeing "the Study of American Literature" in a rearview mirror. No matter how valiantly the individual contributors might try, the result can never quite keep pace with the currents of literary study. Pearl McHaney's entry on prospects for the study of Eudora Welty is a typical example of the inescapable limitations of this genre in print technology.

Written in 2004, copy-edited in 2005, and proofed in 2007, McHaney's entry on Welty was sealed and delivered two years before Welty's centennial activity—that is, before the Eudora Welty Centennial issue of Mississippi Quarterly (Supplement, April 2009) and before the centennial conference in Jackson in April 2009. And the mention of these dedicated, one-time events in the ongoing life of Welty studies does not include the continuing sponsorship of sessions at annual American Literature Association meetings; MLA, SAMLA, and SCMLA conventions; the bi-annual Society for the Study of Southern Literature meetings (last held in 2010); and several other venues for the publication and presentation of work on Welty. It is not that the bibliographer can't keep pace—she can; it is that the print process now seems glacial in the era of electronic publication and distribution.

There is something to say, however, about both the genre of print "prospects" and McHaney's contribution. First, obviously but significantly, Welty is included in a volume with James Fenimore Cooper, Emily Dickinson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Theodore Dreiser, and nine other stalwarts of the US literary canon. Eudora squeaks in at fifteenth place—and not because "W" comes toward the end of the alphabet. But in she is, among choice company. She is six entries away from Dreiser, and I can hear Eudora opining—politely—that six post positions is just about as close as she would like to be to the Hoosier Zola. Such acknowledgement is not to be overlooked. Welty has spent so much time on the cusp (as regional writer, as writer in a "minor" genre, as woman, as too close to Faulkner, as "sheltered"—her own word) that it is reassuring to see her included at last.

McHaney's essay, like most among the fifteen, begins with a map of the apparatus that accompanies and announces "canonicity." There is an outline of Welty's publications in both prose (fiction and nonfiction) and photography and the location of raw research materials: letters, photographic prints and negatives, drafts, unpublished work at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. There is also the mention that her house in Jackson, Mississippi, is now a National Historic Landmark, and that two biographies—one authorized (Suzanne Marrs) and the other not (Ann Waldron)—have appeared to signal that the life of the author is over, and the meaning of that life can now become a resource for understanding the work.

Placing the meaning of Welty's work in the...