Late-19th-Century Literature

Increased interest in scholarship that attempts to unveil the complexities underlying late-19th-century literary culture marks the year: from studies that focus on the literary and intellectual relationships among (sometimes intimate) groups of writers to studies that detail shifting approaches to reading and writing, from investigations of the effects of audience and public markets on writer and genre to those that resurrect forgotten literary figures. Scholars continue to broaden our experience with and understanding of gender, though we seem to have turned a corner toward more critical work deciphering a complex weave of influences on writers of both genders. Considerations of race and ethnicity move beyond the black/white dichotomy to embrace a more complete spectrum of American writers and interests. Book-length projects are more likely to over extended and comparative analysis of groups of writers and often of the impact of culture on literary creation. Relatively few books focus on a single author: the few single-author studies available are biographies or collections. Scholarly essays, on balance, remain the venue for intense scrutiny of individual writers or works. That trend may say more about the present market for books coming out of academic presses than about the abiding interest of individual scholars.

i Late-19th-Century Literary Culture

Louis Menand's Metaphysical Club was released to loud fanfare. Menand weaves a complex story of the literary and intellectual lives of late-19th-century writers and thinkers: from the legal and literary work of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. to the philosophical work of Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. The early chapters on the politics of abolition and the effect of the Civil War on a generation of American (mostly male) intellectuals and on the broad cultural argument over science and biology that informed contemporary theories and policies on race and ethnicity are especially good in bringing together the threads of debate that shaped American pragmatism not only as an academic interest but as a method of thinking that informed movements of social and political reform. The book is a valuable primer on the questions and anxieties that stretched through the last half of the 19th century. On a much smaller scale, Robert K. Nelson and Kenneth M. Price in "Debating Manliness: Thomas Wentworth Higginson, William Sloane Kennedy, and the Question of Whitman" (AL 73: 497–524) over an interesting gloss on the debate over Walt Whitman and sexuality. Kennedy's response to Higginson's complaints against Whitman (here published in full as an addendum) is highly protective and exhibits both blindness to Whitman's homosexuality and a deliberate turn to Whitman's spiritual qualities. Higginson's comments portray a growing conservativeness in an aging radical who sees a deep relationship between politics and poetry. Kennedy's response qualifies him as the most loyal of Whitman's friends and acquaintances.

Questions of authority and how writers approach their role within American society are prominent this year. The discussion of aesthetics or genre is no longer separate from the social and political context. For example, Glenn Hendler's Public Sentiments examines a complex set of psychological and social theories to establish the basis for the literary/social use of sentiment. The distinction between public and private is not presented in simple opposition; the pairing is seen to prompt both general and individual action. The focus is on symbiosis rather than categorical analysis and points to the use of sentiment by both female and male writers to inform social ties and reform movements. Ultimately, the question is how identity is shaped and developed by the ideals of sympathy. Hendler is especially good when dealing with the role of sympathy in creating definitions of masculinity. His chapter on boys' books is particularly useful when we consider how literature or "media" is tied to the moral instruction of children. Sympathy is also a foundation of Stephanie Foote's excellent Regional Fictions. Foote argues that regionalism should be seen as a narrative strategy employed by writers to present the potential for consolidation of various locations/ethnic populations into a single national culture. With a predominantly urban audience, regionalism was both nostalgic...