Where Is American Literature?

It is no longer critically engaging to simply announce one’s work in American literary studies as being “transnational.” This is largely due to the very success that makes this “new” approach not so new anymore. For the past two decades (and perhaps longer) there have been scores of critical books and articles on our subject through hemispheric and transatlantic perspectives and thereby denationalizing it, opening it up theoretically and historically, and (in the best cases) making it look significantly different. The transnational turn has done what the “New Americanists” of the 1980s and 1990s did not fully achieve: dislodge the field from its groundings in the nationalist assumptions and methods originating in an era where Cold War politics and the centrist shift in American liberalism helped inaugurate “American” studies. We now inhabit a moment where the intellectual challenges to such assumptions, where reading American literature along borders, across borders, and without borders has become so robust, indeed so expected, that the critical enterprise itself risks descending into cliché. The three works under review avoid that danger altogether. Each provides genuine theoretical and historiographical challenges to even the most progressive kind of American literary studies today. Each also provides new ways to approach such fundamental terms as history, textuality, and authorship; the works by Anna Brickhouse and Christopher Iannini show how transnational approaches may produce genuine new ways of reading literary texts.

Part of the Wiley Blackwell Manifestos in American literary studies, Caroline Levander’s Where Is American Literature? is a cross between heuristic and polemic, as it provocatively challenges American literary studies to rethink its object of study in light of the mobility of “American” texts, writers, and artifacts. Levander early on cogently argues that American literature is (and has always been) both discovered and invented. By asking “where”—instead of “what”—American literature is, she encourages us to reimagine it globally and even “reframe causality.” This means shifting our focus from authors, works, and literary periods to the many “centers, peripheries, borderlands or metropoles” (7) through which American literature continually moves. Employing the methods of book history and cultural materialism, Levander recounts dozens of case studies demonstrating the itinerancy of texts and the complex processes of literary production and consumption involving collaborations among readers, publishers, designers, and consumers who market and transform literary materials.

Each chapter focuses on a particular site where American literature may be found, ranging broadly, if sometimes quirkily, across actual and virtual places where texts are produced, reproduced, adapted, distorted, and sometimes wholly transformed. The first chapter, “In the Eye of the Beholder,” provides a rich, expansive excursus through the “complex and collaborative” cross-pollinations of American literature (39): Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s lesser-known status as translator of Spanish and French works, for example, Jose Maria Heredia’s translation of Daniel Webster’s 1825 Bunker Hill Oration; or the roles Benjamin Franklin and James Fenimore Cooper play in inspiring the Argentinian writer Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s Facunda (1845), which was subsequently translated into English. These sites of transnational exchange and cross-pollination (and many others she discusses with impressive hemispheric erudition) demonstrate that American literature is “always already between spaces institutional, physical, geopolitical and conceptual—that is, always circuiting the globe … transforming literary material that it poaches, and being transformed by those around the world” (56).

Where Is American Literature? takes us everywhere from tourist sites and book clubs to digital platforms and new media. The section “Environments” considers both the actual and virtual spaces of literary encounter and cultural transmission. Levander’s consideration of the cultural fetish of the author’s house—the Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe houses in Hartford, Connecticut...