Themes, Topics, Criticism

This year’s scholarship is marked by continued movement in familiar directions. The recent interest in literary representations of identity and a similar interest in expanding and expansive definitions of national citizenship lead to a body of criticism focused heavily on the processes by which subjectivity is understood, organized, produced, and represented. What constitutes American in this literature is—and in most accounts has always been—in contention and under revision; the term is a dynamically moving signifier. In some work the flexibility of national identity is represented as localized inside of historical periods, as in the work of Sean Goudie, discussed below. Elsewhere the affective side of subjectivity takes the critical emphasis, as evidenced by contributions from Ivy Schweitzer and Ezra Tawil; here feeling in the context of friendship becomes a marker of historicized human consciousness. A similar emphasis on feeling and friendship appears in Andrew Epstein’s account of post-World War II American poetry. Jacqueline Goldsby offers a remarkable investigation into the powerfully disturbing rituals of community making and into literature’s complicity in those processes.

The emphasis on identity, framed frequently within the context of the body, means that literariness sometimes becomes pushed into the background. The loss of a sense of literariness, a product of different and successive versions of cultural studies, appears to erase the distinctions between different kinds of writing. For some critics this erasure is something to be welcomed, since it “de-privileges” a category of expression linked with social and economic class. Yet literariness has its moments this year. Goldsby’s work distinguishes itself on this count, as do the contributions of David Yaffe, Philipp Schweighauser, Epstein, and Walter Kalaidjian. This kind of scholarship embeds the formal and aesthetic inside the social in consistently interesting ways. This fruitful mixture of interests, though, makes easy categorization difficult. Is a work focusing on the figuration of the body in early American literature, one locating that figuration within shifting cultural definitions of difference, a literary history, strictly speaking? That hybridity of identity should take so prominent a place mirrors the processes of scholarship itself, where mixed forms of commentary make difficult the division of works into the historical, the thematic, or the topical.

i Histories

Ivy Schweitzer’s Perfecting Friendship offers a suggestive reading of friendship in 18th- and early-19th-century American literature. Building on classical definitions and stressing the fundamentally democratic links among equals, Perfecting Friendship engages literary representations of friendship as mirroring central political and social questions attendant to the emerging United States. One of Schweitzer’s primary interests lies in how the horizontality of friendship comes into conflict with fundamentally vertical and hierarchical relations implied by conquest, specifically the removal of indigenous peoples. A similar thread appears in her readings of gender relations within the context of marriage: are husband and wife “friends” or is the relation more complicated, given the extent to which ideas of sociality are read into and out of the marriage relation? Focusing on John Winthrop’s 1630 “Model of Christian Charity,” Schweitzer details how the problematic relation of equality and hierarchy complicates Winthrop’s representation of proper theological, social, and political relations. His essentially hierarchical model becomes elaborated and in some respects made even more problematic in Schweitzer’s readings of Hannah Webster Foster’s Coquette, James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans, and Catharine Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie: all three complicate the consideration of friendship by suggesting how both gender and race reveal the essential inequalities and incongruities of common understandings of friendship. Schweitzer’s book delineates how affiliation was understood in the first half-century of the Republic and how national political life complicated our imaginings of community. Her larger intellectual goal is to make room for an idea of connection that takes difference into account, and she meditates, as does much other recent scholarship, on the implications of difference for our own senses of self and our developing understanding of how we relate to others.

Sean Goudie’s Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic (Penn.) attempts to engage...