Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (review)

Like Kristie Hamilton's America's Sketchbook: The Cultural Life of a Nineteenth-Century Literary Genre (Athens, 1999), Casper's excellent Constructing American Lives defines a new way of conceiving and writing literary history. Rather than merely tracking changes in formal practice or critical consensus, Casper sets out to write what can genuinely be called the "cultural history" of a genre-a capacious account of the changing conditions of its production and reception, of its effect on its readers, and of its ideological reverberations. The study thus shares the aims of "new historicism"-its account of the aesthetic features of the genre being deployed to define its ideological force-but, as Casper wryly acknowledges, this is new historicism deprived of its customary aura of subversion or demystification. The book offers a history of the making of an American mainstream, less about struggles for power than acts of affiliation. Casper's second major intellectual loyalty is to the scholarly movement known as "the history of the book," which leads him to a stunning range of primary sources and yields his rich sense of how and what books mean.

Like recent studies of early American novels, working class fiction, and literary domesticity, this is a project of critical reclamation. A form of writing, immensely popular in its day, has disappeared from view, and its significance needs to be recovered. As Casper presents it, the writing and reading of biography most arrestingly emerges as less a literary than an ideological endeavor. The acts of self-making that biographies describe capture and shape the life narratives that, obliquely but powerfully, help compose a nation.

Initially, an insistently "American" biography cast Revolutionary heroes as models to inspire their successors. From 1820 to 1860, however, explosive growth in the publishing industry yielded a stunning proliferation of biographies, with subjects ranging from the celebrated to the obscure. Casper argues that biographical practice at this time was distinguished by its embrace of a newly individualistic form of self-schooling. Subjects modeled for their male readers not "Republican Virtue" but the private disciplines that might yield public "success" in a variety of forms, whereas female readers found mainly exemplars of the virtues and feelings attuned to domestic life.

As biography moved through mid-century, this broadening was accompanied by an aggressive self-consciousness among some writers and critics of the genre. The critical debates, and changes in practice, began to cluster along different axes of the question of authenticity. Most strikingly, a new, romantic concept of character gained currency among both writers and readers; the serious biographer's task was to capture the particular "genius" of the subject; the reader's goal was not imitation but the discovery of a unique genius of his own. Alongside this "deepened" sense of character, a new stringency about sources emerged, exemplified by Jared Sparks' Library of American Biography (Boston, 1834-1848), 25v., with its emphasis on a "professional" use of documentary materials.

Out of this mid-century mix of principles and practice came the career of James Parton, a writer who, combining rigor and empathy, found himself proclaimed a genius and his genre elevated to the status of "literature" (even as he kept cranking out the didactic and highly popular brief biographies that financed his researches). Parton's era, 1850 to 1880, marks the acme of biography's prestige and influence. Paradoxically, the waning of the genre's cultural authority came from the deployment of authenticity against it. First, a new commitment to "realism" among critics and historians punctured the balloons of "genius" and "greatness," and, in the twentieth century, a psychoanalytical sense of character-depth with a vengeance-seemed to rob the genre at last of its exemplary force.

The analytic authority of Casper's book derives from the imaginativeness-and rigor-with which he executes his design. A body of striking archival material permits him to describe with great...