The Canon and the Survey: An Anthologist’s Perspective

When Samuel Otter and I invited Maurice Lee to participate in the roundtable we organized for the 2014 C19 conference at Chapel Hill, we knew we were taking a risk. After all, Lee has come to be known as a take-no-prisoners provocateur, a scholar who regularly interrogates and dismantles our assumptions about race, chance, and, most recently, the field itself. But who could have predicted the Sturm und Drang that he would bring to our quaintly titled roundtable, “The Commons and Us: The Field of C19”? Armed with a PowerPoint presentation consisting of graphs, charts, and statistics, Lee began unassumingly enough by asking us to take a moment to jot down the ten authors we believed have been most represented in recent American literature survey courses covering the years 1800–1865. The C19-ers in the crowded room dutifully made their lists, and as I watched their arm and hand movements I managed to discern, in the manner of Poe’s Dupin, the scrawling of names like James Monroe Whitfield, John Rollin Ridge, William Gilmore Simms, and Tabitha Gilman Tenney. Then Lee dropped his bombshell. Based on his crunching of the author coverage on the 131 syllabi that he had examined, he could now reveal that the (or, more precisely, our) most frequently taught author is Herman Melville, followed by Hawthorne, Whitman, Douglass, Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, Poe, Stowe, and Irving. A stunned silence filled the room, and then a frantic buzzing. We had been found out! We had been exposed! The senior professor sitting immediately across from the panel, right in my line of vision, turned to the person to her left and exclaimed, “Well, I never teach Poe!” Within the buzzing, were there similar pleas of innocent as charged? Or drunken confessions? Hard to say. But had Lee charged the group with anything? Again, hard to say. Poker-faced throughout his presentation, Lee held a winning hand, but it wasn’t clear what game he had come to play.

For instance, despite all of the hand-wringing in the crowd, and a subsequent conversation in which people talked about their own engagement with a much wider range of authors, Lee never came right out with a claim that there was something wrong (or right) about teaching canonical writers in a survey class. In fact, his large aim may have been in keeping with the conference theme itself: a generous effort on his part to show that we had a lot in common in our sustained interest in such authors as Melville, Douglass, and Poe.¹ From my point of view as the editor of the 1820–1865 volume of The Norton Anthology of American Literature, I have to confess that I hardly saw anything dire in the revelation that C-19 people remain interested in the authors we feature in our anthology. And I hardly saw anything surprising, either. In preparation for our regular revisions of the anthology, Norton does a market survey to see which authors instructors are teaching in their surveys, and which authors instructors want cut or added. Lee’s statistical analysis is completely in sync with what we learned from our most recent market analysis in 2014. For example, in the survey of volume B (1820–1865), our top-eleven authors were the same top-eleven authors of Lee’s analysis, though in a slightly different order. With over two hundred instructors responding to the question of which authors are absolutely essential to their survey classes, the rankings were as follows: Emerson (96.62 percent), Thoreau (95.83 percent), Whitman (95.33 percent), Dickinson (95.33 percent), Hawthorne (95.25 percent), Poe (94.63 percent), Melville (94.29 percent), Douglass (91.61 percent), Irving (85.51 percent), Jacobs (75.51 percent), and Stowe (71.72 percent). Clearly, there were no great statistical differences among the top seven or even top eight writers on our survey, though given Jacobs’s primacy over Stowe, the Norton survey produced a top-ten list that was 20 percent African American, which certainly represents a major canonical shift from...