Themes, Topics, Criticism, p. 425-441

What precisely constitutes American identity continues to be a central concern of literary scholarship. As conceptions of identity itself continue to become refined and in many respects more complicated, the relations between various forms of identity—nation, region, race, gender, class—become more complicated too. This year's work provides several elaborations. Gregg Crane and Gabrielle Foreman reflect on the legal means by which identity is defined as well as on the discursive methods by which we name ourselves or find ourselves named. Others, like Elizabeth McHenry, focus on the social aspects of reading as a measure of collective identity. An important development in the field, however, is the consistent recognition that identity politics can be powerfully divisive to the social whole and require other mechanisms by which the individual is recognized as part of something beyond himself or herself. The critical investigation of how social bonds are represented in literature and what the theoretical foundations and critical implications of those bonds might be forms the center of contributions from Kristin Boudreau and Randall Knoper. Undoubtedly, the question of identity finds itself complicated not simply by the multiple "selves" we occupy, but also by how crucial periods in the nation's past are configured. Continuing recent revaluations of the 1920s and 1930s, the contributions of William Solomon, Celena Kusch, and Jessica Burstein focus our attention on significant rereadings of the period, paying close attention to the connection between literary form and historical circumstance.

Science is another important influence on this year's scholarship. Just as important is the elaboration of a post-Marxian theory of social and economic class. As in previous years, the tension between aesthetics and politics proves informing, as literary scholarship works to refine our sense of the categories that condition reading—history, nation, region, genre, and identity.

i Identities

In Race, Citizenship, and Law in American Literature (Cambridge) Gregg Crane offers an analysis of several central 19th-century American writers in the light of the conflict between higher law theory and legal positivism relative to questions of American identity. Focusing specifically on the representations of race in both literary and legal sources, Crane proposes an emerging consensus among writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, and Charles Chesnutt that the categories defining identity are and ought to be ethical and moral rather than strictly legal, and that our sense of both American culture and polity is determined by something other than power. The national consideration of slavery and the agitation over Reconstruction afford Crane a good deal of material to investigate. The nature of race and its relation to American citizenship naturally play a central role here, as do the implications of difference generally considered. If the various kinds of difference are underwritten by a power beyond the realm of the legal, how are we to understand what those differences signify? If higher law suggests to us that difference is finally ephemeral, how does that belief affect how we understand historical events, social policy, and political conditions that seem dependent on the fact of difference (slavery, poverty, or even affirmative action)?

One of the central benefits of Race, Citizenship, and Law in American Literature is its ability to make connections between, say, Supreme Court decisions and novels, or newspaper accounts and essays or poetry. Given the contentious contemporary discussions over racial categorization, citizenship, and the like, Crane's volume has weight beyond its ability to shed light on 19th-century literature. The cosmopolitanism favored by Paul Gilroy and others finds support in this work, as Crane's reading of American literature suggests that a critical resistance to divisive categorization (a resistance that does not slide easily into naive universalism) has a longer history in both law and literature than one might imagine.

One of the implications of destabilizing race as the sign of identity is that such a move has clear implications for the categories identifying different kinds of American literature. Jonathan Brennan's collection of essays, Mixed Race Literature (Stanford), seeks to come to grips with literature that destabilizes racial identity. The contributors...