Early-19th-Century Literature

The sheer heft and diversity of scholarship on formerly noncanonical women and minority writers—while Poe holds his own—productively complicate antebellum studies this year.

i Period Studies

Ethnic/regional identities and definitions of sentimentalism characterize this year's period studies. Counterintuitively, Daniel Kilbride's "Travel, Ritual, and National Identity: Planters on the European Tour, 1820–1860" (Journal of Southern History 69: 549–85) argues that white Americans traveling to Europe tended to set aside regional views on slavery out of an American nationalism which "fus[ed] privileged northerners and southerners into an American upper class." It is just this sense of upper-class privilege that likely leads John Carlos Rowe to lend his support—judiciously—to a transnational reading of this most nationalist period of American literary culture in "Nineteenth-Century United States Literary Culture and Transnationality" (PMLA 118: 78–89). Rowe argues that we have to be cautious about projecting a term like "transnational"—a term that grew out of postmodern global capitalism—onto earlier periods. Nevertheless, "[e]ven if our historical study teaches us merely that imagining communities other than the nation is difficult, in part because of the powerful grip of nationalist rhetoric on theoretical models, intellectual methods, and educational institutions, then extending transnationality to the heyday of United States nationalism is a valuable enterprise."

One such enterprise is Malini Johar Schueller and Edward Watts's coedited Messy Beginnings, which argues that stories of American literary history, including postcolonial American studies, must be more carefully nuanced to address not the absorption (assimilation) of heterogeneous cultures into "the space of the [white] nation-state," but rather the entanglements by which minority cultures continue to retain specific identity in the complex dialogics of national discourse. Relevant here is Laura Donaldson's eloquent "Making a Joyful Noise: William Apess and the Search for Postcolonial Resistance" (pp. 29–44), which argues, among other things, that Apess valued evangelical Methodism for its likeness to his Native American culture, as today American Indian women "re-traditionalize" their own Native values in non-Native environments. Michele Burnham's "The Periphery Within: Internal Colonization and the Rhetoric of U.S. Nation Building" (pp. 139–54) argues evocatively that American postcolonial studies should address "internal colonialism" instead of "international colonialism," which is borne out, for example, in James Seaver's unsuccessful attempt to erase Mary Jemison's Native American identity by retranscribing Jemison as a white woman in his edition of Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison. Mary's internal voice of "Seneca words, of an Indian mode of chronology," cannot be erased. Finally, Schueller's incisive "Nation, Missionary, Women, and the Race of True Womanhood" (pp. 155–74) scrutinizes the problematic manner in which midcentury American bourgeois white women attempted to gain power through narrativizing the "uplift of Oriental women" in Syria, as evidenced in Sara Smith's Memoir, Ellen Clare Miller's Eastern Sketches (1871), and Maria Cummins's El Fureidis (1860).

Also concerned with the politics of domesticity, Amy Schrager Lang's Syntax of Class lucidly and convincingly defines the literary strategies by which 19th-century American writers used the concept of home to espouse a "doctrine of the harmony of interests" between owner and laborer which would work to sublimate real-life working conditions, racial oppression, and the restless discontent of the proletariat. Lang argues in chapter 1 that "home" operates most clearly in the woman's domestic novel; in the "shoes and kittens" economy of Maria Cummins's The Lamplighter, Lang explains, the dire straits of the shoeless urban waif Gerty are inevitably ameliorated by her woman-gendered affection for a kitten. This is Gerty's spiritual passport into "a self outside of class" and outside history within the domestic comforts of a white middle-class home.

In chapter 2 Lang proves how much more complexly "home" functions against the white racist concept of African Americans as homeless— without a home because their home should be in Africa. Frank Webb's The Garies and Their Friends focuses on the "white-on-black violence" in antebellum Philadelphia and illustrates that "self-possession...