Essaying Antebellum Prose

Hard on the heels of volume 1 of The Cambridge History of American Literature, which covered early American literature from initial European contact with native peoples through the early Republic, comes this volume, devoted to all forms of prose writing in the antebellum period. Those who found the first installment of this long-awaited series a useful, though hardly complementary, collection of monographs should be more pleased with this effort, for herein the general editor has assembled four sophisticated contributions that reassess the remarkable literary achievement of the period. ¹

Keeping his introductory comments to a minimum, Bercovitch sets the agenda by reiterating what he observed in the first volume in the series. Briefly put, he argues that, as we approach the millennium, consensus about America’s literary history has broken down and been replaced by dissensus, with any invocation of the former sounding “rather like an appeal for compromise, or nostalgia.” Further, “what used to be a relatively clear division between criticism and scholarship, aesthetic and historical analysis,” he observes, “has blurred and then subdivided over and over again (in various combinations) into a spectrum of special interests” (p. 2). Thus, with American literary history now defined “in the plural,” each contributor was given free rein to approach relevant texts through whatever points of view seemed to him or her most productive, the whole volume integrated mainly through the ways that each scholar’s authority would complement that of the others. Happily for posterity, the intellectual gamble worked well; the book’s four sections are a hand difficult to beat for an overview of antebellum prose.

The volume succeeds so well because of the strength of each contribution, for, as Bercovitch had hoped, all four scholars demonstrate themselves in full control of general methodologies as well as the range of prose literature germane to them. So what do we have here? Michael Davitt Bell contributes a piece on “The Conditions of Literary Vocation,” essentially an overview of the literary marketplace or, as Bercovitch puts it, “an inside narrative of literature as cultural work” (p. 6). Eric Sundquist gives us a monograph on “The Literature of Expansion and Race,” a brilliant section that sheds light on a myriad of texts heretofore dismissed as unworthy of the critic’s attention, a history, according to the general editor, that “brings together the multifarious strains of a culture in formation” (p. 6). Through an approach that used to be called “intellectual history,” Barbara Packer provides a detailed overview of the discourse of “The Transcendentalists.” In the most theoretically inclined contribution, Jonathan Arac discusses “Narrative Forms” and provides “a genealogy of genres, and more specifically an analysis of the dynamics of narrative modes” that were central to the period (p. 7). Rounding out the show, associate editor Cyrus R. K. Pattell compiles a seventy-page Chronology of “American Texts,” “American Events,” and “Other Events and Texts” (primarily in European history), followed by a bibliography of books “drawn from lists provided by the contributors,” consisting of “especially influential or significant” studies but excluding monographs on individual authors.

Finally, by way of introduction, I should point out that, as with the first volume of the CHAL, this is not so much a “reference” work (as many literary histories hitherto have been considered) but rather an attempt to establish a benchmark for the literary history of a given period as that history and period now are conceived. Thus, while the volume is filled with information, more important are the contributor’s modes of interpretation, for to the advanced student or scholar the book is meant to be more generative than definitive. And it genuinely is: to devour it at a few sittings induces nothing less than pleasant intellectual vertigo.

Bell’s discussion of the “Conditions of Literary Vocation” appears in two lengthy chapters, one on “The Beginnings of Professionalism,” the other treating “Women’s Fiction and the Literary Marketplace in the 1860s.” Both are contributions to the...