- Young Americans in Literature: The Post-Romantic Turn in the Age of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville by Takayuki Tatsumi
Takayuki Tatsumi is among Japan's most internationally recognized scholars of American literature, having written and published widely not only on Poe, but on a number of other nineteenth- and twentieth-century American writers for over thirty years. His critical writings often focus on cultural transactions between Pacific and Atlantic, and especially American and Japanese, writers. His approach often interfuses close textual analysis with a broad range of popular cultural reference, advancing nonchronological critical practices meant to highlight reemergent themes and patterns across historical periods and cultural contexts. Such an approach informs most of the essays gathered in Young Americans in Literature: The Post-Romantic Turn in the Age of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville.
Consider, for example, the book's title itself. I initially expected Young Americans in Literature to focus on the relationship each of these writers had to the mid-nineteenth-century Young America Movement, with which each of them was at least indirectly associated and of which each of them was also at times critical. The title, however, indicates something else entirely; Tatsumi describes the book as an attempt to imbibe the "spirit of youth and newness" of these writers themselves, in order to "reread the American Renaissance from the viewpoint of Transdisciplinary, Transcultural and Transchronological American studies" (40). Much of this rereading involves examining how the work of these nineteenth-century Americans are "made new" by their influence on and interweaving with those of later writers including Yonejiro Noguchi, Edogawa Rampo, Joseph Cornell, and William Gibson.
Rather than a rigorously united monograph, Young Americans in Literature is an intriguing assembly of interconnected essays, most of them rooted in prior publications, keynote lectures, and conference papers that Tatsumi has delivered over the years. These origins are reflected by the brevity, loosely associative tendency, conversational tone, and only selective engagement with existing scholarship that characterizes the book as a whole. As its title suggests, however, Young Americans in Literature's chapters are unified to some degree by their concern with how work by Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, and Dickinson has attained a kind of untimely significance, marking a culmination of Romanticism while anticipating, and indeed, helping to [End Page 142] Young Americans in Literature is divided into an introduction, seven chapters, and a conclusion, each of them brief and referring to only a handful of critical sources. The introduction, "Young Americans as Post-Romantics: Kant, Coleridge, and Emerson," begins by outlining Tatsumi's career as an Americanist, starting as a "naïve, innocent but highly ambitious graduate student in the late-1970s" (19). Tatsumi uses the introduction to contextualize the book as a whole and each of its chapters, indicating their origins in earlier research, publications, and presentations. He notes that some of the material from the first chapters reworks aspects of his Cornell University doctoral dissertation, "Disfiguration of Genres: A Reading in the Rhetoric of Edgar Allan Poe" (1987). The introduction also foregrounds the curiously autobiographical tone of the book as a whole, which often seems a kind of retrospective on both Tatsumi's career and the course of American literary studies from the 1920s through to the twenty-first century.
The most fully developed chapter in terms of Poe's own literary-historical context is the first, "Literacy, Literality, Literature: The Rise of Cultural Aristocracy in 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue.'" It offers an impressionistic survey of Poe's literary and scholarly reception, which is itself a microcosm "of modern literary criticism ranging from New Criticism through post-structuralism" (41). Tatsumi considers how Poe's literary practice shaped both later critical practice and his perennial prominence in popular consumer culture through a discussion of both the abortive "Tales of the Folio Club" and Arthur Gordon Pym, works that illustrate the irony that "technological innovation" at once "promoted the democratization of literature and the aristocratization of literate people" (44). Tatsumi uses an analysis...