Aesthetics, Feeling, and Form in Early American Literary Studies

Our field has always had a vexed relationship to aesthetics. In its late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century prehistory, critics repeatedly apologized for the unliterariness of early American authors: Anne Brad-street was an exemplary Puritan but a merely derivative poet (Tucker 154); Benjamin Franklin was a representative American but more of a clever rhetorical stylist than a writer of great literature (Sherman 92). As a yet unnamed and largely neglected stepchild of what was itself the still minor field of American literature, and lacking any major canonical author in the English tradition, early American literary studies was characterized by a profound commitment to historicism. For example, Perry Miller, the most influential practitioner of the mid-twentieth century, could be described as a religious and intellectual historian as much as a literary scholar.¹ Miller’s legacy would continue to exert an important gravitational pull through both his voluminous body of writing and the efforts of numerous important students, including both literary scholars such as Alan Heimert and David Levin, and historians such as Bernard Bailyn and Edmund Morgan. It is no surprise then that the formalism that dominated major fields of literary studies such as the Renaissance and modernism in the 1950s and ‘60s had very little influence in early American studies.

The timing of our disciplinary coalescence during this era only complicated matters. Not long after Early American Literature was founded in 1965, literary studies confronted the theoretical rejection of formalism, as articulated by such scholars as Geoffrey Hartman and Paul de Man, which gradually pushed to the margins claims about aesthetic value and artistic excellence. By the 1980s, even as the advent of the New Historicism inspired a critical focus on the rhetorical power of texts, the critique of aesthetics as an ideological tool discouraged attention to elite literary forms and cultures of imagination, taste, and pleasure.² For many early Americanists, this critical shift away from aesthetics was consistent with their understanding of the field; the Puritan distrust of art, the Federalist lament of American literary underachievement, combined with our own judgments of the field’s frequently strange, ungainly, fragmentary, anxious, even paranoid texts, all appeared to confirm that early Americans produced rich and fascinating traditions of writing, but only imitative or insignificant aesthetic cultures. According to this view, election day sermons, meditative poems, travel journals, captivity narratives, and gothic novels informed cultural histories of politics, religion, gender, race, and colonialism and bore useful witness to linguistic instability and ideological contradiction, but they told us less about the special ability of language to please the imagination and move the soul.

Nevertheless, as we approached the end of the twentieth century, aesthetic questions would become a matter of keen interest to some of the field’s most prominent scholars, even if their primary concerns were historical or political. William Spengemann argued for an idea of early American literature that was less concerned with an “imagined nationality” (34) and more attentive to the “stylistic innovations” of British colonialism (34). David Leverenz explored the significance of religious sentiment and fellow feeling in Puritan texts; and William Scheick and Teresa Toulouse examined the aesthetics of their form and reception. Jay Fliegelman (Prodigals and Pilgrims) traced the way particular narrative tropes were reproduced in different forms across various media; Cathy Davidson described the generic and affective work of early American novels; and Julia Stern, Elizabeth Barnes, and Julie Ellison investigated the discourses of sympathy in these and other sentimental texts. Michael Warner elaborated the formal expression of republican print ideology in late eighteenth-century writing; and Robert Ferguson explained how a “consensual” aesthetic made such writing politically effective (8). Christopher Looby, Sandra Gustafson, and Fliegelman (Declaring Independence) extended this inquiry to the formal character and affective power of orality both within and beyond printed texts. David S. Shields (Civil Tongues and Polite Letters) detailed the role of taste, politeness, and sociability in the making of elite British colonial life; and William Dowling uncovered the Federalist investment in the literary imagination. These studies and numerous others used a diverse range of intellectual frameworks...