The Sketch, the Tale, and the Beginnings of American Literature by Lydia G. Fash, and: The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature by Jonathan Senchyne (review)

At first glance, Lydia Fash's and Jonathan Senchyne's books must appear to have little to do with one another. Fash's volume digs deeply into textuality, exploring the meaning of literary beginnings, specifically in the forms of the tale and the sketch, and the relevance of these two forms for a larger beginning: the peculiar formation of American literature. She complements close reading with attention to production contexts, but her focus clearly lies on textuality. Senchyne, by contrast, explicitly seeks to complement textuality with materiality, with thingness, with attention to the material text is printed on, linen rag paper. Fash's exploration of literary nationalism restricts her to a timeframe structured by political events, beginning with the Revolution of 1776; Senchyne, on the other hand, expansively ranges from Anne Bradstreet to the contemporary moment, though his central argument ends in the mid-nineteenth century with the advent of wood pulp paper. Their primary texts—a much larger set in Fash's book than Senchyne's, it should be said—do not overlap, with the exception of William Wells Brown's Clotel.

What links these books and makes it useful to look at their arguments together are their respective investment in reading their objects as constituting different kinds of communities. In Fash's case, that community is the nation, and in particular the new nation of the United States. In Senychne's it is a more amorphous community produced by the relation to paper, "a site of intimacy, where intriguing proximities and contacts became possible" (5). Of the two, Fash's book is the more conservative conceptually. It plumbs, as she has it, "national character as prominent and prolific short fiction writers were constituting it" in the antebellum period (17). To some readers, this might even appear a bit regressive, paying attention to a set very specific genres and their relation to American literary nationalism. Such arguments sit in a tradition of scholarship that has related US literature to newness and nationhood ranging back at least to R. W. B. Lewis's The American Adam (1955); on the other, short story scholarship has already explored the connections between the "new" short forms emerging in the United States and their constitution of Americanness—of "national character," as Fash has it (17). "American short fiction helped readers make [the] imaginary jump [from "I" to "We, the people"] as its quotidian nature—that is, its frequent appearance and its comfortable claim of portraying US citizens—incorporated and reincorporated regular readers into the people," Fash argues (5). In this relationship between national identity and form, Fash is more interested in form, which is also more thoroughly theorized than any idea of the nation. In particular, two forms are selected for greater attention: "The temporal strategies developed and deployed in these tales and sketches are about making space in a culture of beginnings, a culture vocally invested in defining the United States" (10). Over the next five chapters, Fash then explores the sketches and tales of Washington Irving, Sarah Josepha Hale, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe in separate chapters, ending in the final chapter on a discussion of a quartet of 1850s "great" novels: The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Clotel. Each of the chapters on individual authors also concentrates on specific sets of texts that Fash understands as constitutive for versions of "beginning" the United States, rather than all of her chosen authors' work.

It is perhaps important to say more clearly that Fash's argument does add to our knowledge of early American short fiction, despite its apparently...