Introduction

For over half a century Americanists have busily been trying to change what became known by the 1960s as the literary canon. We have recovered neglected writers, especially white women and authors from minority and ethnic communities, whose work seldom appeared in literary study or in anthologies or publishers' lists. And we have succeeded in altering the cultural landscape within academic institutions. What is taught at every educational level is significantly different today from what it was even thirty years ago. This change is unequivocally positive. A great diversity of voices has always characterized American culture; as Walt Whitman put it: "I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear" (line 1).

But the process of recovering these "varied carols" has never been an end in itself. Practitioners have seen literary and cultural recovery mainly as part of a great democratic effort to enable all people to be heard and respected, and to promote equality in social, economic and political realms. For what could it mean if we simply enjoyed listening to those "varied carols," leaving their singers and communities in isolated poverty and despair? In short, recovery always involves a democratic, inclusive politics. Democracy requires inclusion, not just between the covers of a book but also in the chambers of government and the seminars of learning, where to be unheard is to be ignored and to be ignored is to have your humanity revoked.

How can we make these carols and their singers more widely heard beyond the academy? How might doing so foster American democracy? Our roundtable at the 2018 Society for the Study of American Women Writers conference wrestled with these questions. The presentations, reproduced below, continue to amplify both "recovered" and newly fashioned Americans' carols and politics.