Editorial Note

Volume 20, No. 3, of American Literary History is devoted to reviews of books from the last 20 years of American literary studies. Twenty authors were invited to choose among scholarly studies or works of theory or history that they thought had not received their due or that needed reassessment since their publication. A few contributors also combined the discussion of one book with one or two others in order to address a key topic in American literary studies or one whose proportions were only now vividly discernible.

My idea was that too many books have been forgotten or reviewed badly, in the sense that reviewers might not have had the categories to appreciate their arguments, or that their achievements were misprized—or they had unjustifiably passed without pertinent comment at all. I asked these scholars to select books that they believed had been ill served. The authors’ only constraint was that ALH should not have already featured the book for review.

This volume provides a chance to catch up on titles that have proved exciting or that now excite further recognition. During ALH’s twentieth anniversary, I wanted the journal to register how the ongoing process of shaping our field might be ascertained through the way books have been reviewed over the last two decades. Such a set of reviews, taken together, might tell us more about the state of professing American literary studies. So I then asked three respected critic-scholars to weigh the record of our authors’ reassessments. Each has something trenchant to add to the discussion, and I trust that you will find these commentaries among the most compelling pieces in the issue.

ALH began with a policy of publishing essay-reviews. The idea was that there were so many topics that were new and fresh in the late 1980s that to do justice to them on a regular basis, we needed our reviews to constellate several related titles whose import, taken together, would enable our contributor to deliberate over their aggregate interest both for specialists and for other Americanists who might be turning to such an article to learn what was going on. Our review articles make little effort to include any one title but point to the interest of cognate ones, so much of the detailed discussion of new books appears in far-flung critical journals—devoted to period, region, author, genre, or topic. Thus, Americanists too seldom get to see what other Americanists are up to and can miss that perspective in thinking through what needs to be done in our narrower concerns.

Volume 20, No. 3 also makes a historical case that there needs to be a finer attention to the business of reviewing. This enlarged value for reviewing can help improve our shared sense of the new books that we need to read and ask our students to read. Some books obviously do not suffer from a want of engagement, yet judging by the hundreds that cross my desk each year, only a handful escape benign neglect—and this is a shame.

For this issue, I aimed to create a diversity of topics and a broad range of critical perspectives, since I believed that we could at least offer an example for reengaging the titles that finally emerged. The rationale for this effort is, in part, the opportunity to reflect, via the essay-review format, what our recent history has been as a scholarly field attentive to its production. Over the years, the books we have reviewed in this journal have all participated in a broader discussion of figuring out the parameters of American literary history—of what books belong in the discussion and why—so I hope that the books appearing in this special issue will do no less.