Old Style: Unoriginality and Its Uses in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature by Claudia Stokes, and: Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women's Poetry by Jennifer Putzi

In a 2016 profile of the poet Eileen Myles, journalist Emily Witt coined the "Theory of the Bad Copy"—a distillation of Myles's belief that copying can be a vehicle for artistic and social change. According to Myles, who has suggested that Black Sparrow Press published them "as a bad copy of Charles Bukowski," people often break with the past by presenting as imitations of established figures (Witt 2016).¹ Copying may ease difference, but it also allows new artists to slip through the door and shake things up.

The Theory of the Bad Copy suggests that as much as contemporary Western society professes to value originality, it more readily cleaves to the familiar. Latent in the concept of a "bad" copy is the critique that failures of imagination cloud audience ability to recognize what is new or original. At the same time, there's something subversive about a copy characterized by its badness. In a culture that outwardly praises innovation while denigrating imitation, the bad copy disrupts, slyly reframing the act of copying as creative work. Myles themself has described copying as an essential part of their poetic labor: "[copying] is a form of loving the world. … It is a form of chanting and I do it for religious reasons. I mean it's my default position" (Myles 2020).

Practices of imitation also offer social and creative resources for the nineteenth-century Americans whom Claudia Stokes and Jennifer Putzi discuss in their respective monographs. Yet while Myles embraces copying as a mode of introspection and individual renewal, these earlier American authors copy and imitate primarily to forge networks and connections—with the past, with the literary establishment, with each other. Challenging the assumption that originality is a timeless artistic value, Stokes and Putzi explicate unoriginality's appeal for particular nineteenth-century American audiences by pairing close readings of texts with attention to material conditions of textual production, circulation, and use.

The nexus of the textual and the material has been a generative site for thinking about the role of copying in the nineteenth-century United States. In recent decades, scholarship including Meredith L. McGill's American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting (2003), Lindsay DiCuirci's Colonial Revivals: The Nineteenth-Century Lives of Early American Books (2018), and the Viral Texts Mapping Project (est. 2012) has positioned reprinting as an important heuristic for understanding early American literary culture. Research on nineteenth-century African American literature, including the essays in Early African American Print Culture (2012), has been crucial to recovering the social and political functions of copying, including how practices such as quotation index nineteenth-century Black American authors' orientation toward the collective. While both Stokes and Putzi engage this scholarship to examine how copying organizes material and social practices, their respective studies help connect the study of material texts with questions and methods drawn from aesthetics and poetics. Together, Old Style and Fair Copy invite scholars to take unoriginal texts seriously as literature—and to ask why the unoriginal has become cause for literary dismissal in the first place.

In Old Style, Claudia Stokes charts the rise and fall of unoriginality as a "legitimate aesthetic mode" in the nineteenth-century United States (2021, 2). Revisiting a familiar story of the early national period as an era of print expansion, Stokes shows that even as some authors and publishers deployed novelty to compete for attention in a crowded market, others advocated for treating the borrowed, familiar, and traditional as markers of literary skill and taste. For many early nineteenth-century Americans, Stokes argues, originality was suspect. Being perceived as literary was less about producing iconoclastic newness than showcasing knowledge of literary history and establishing continuity between past and present. Although unoriginality gained elitist associations by the end of the nineteenth century, Stokes demonstrates that the unoriginal initially offered writers of color and white women writers a gateway into the literary mainstream.

Stokes's first chapter recovers the work of Lucretia Davidson, a child poet whose immense popularity underscores early American audiences' love of literature that treads familiar ground. Davidson's artistic choices were governed by "an interest in mastering some of the era's most popular styles and verse forms" (Stokes 2021, 28). Although the poet's unchildlike use of forms such as the infant elegy and maternal prayer may suggest unthinking imitation, Stokes frames Davidson's poems as études for adulthood. For Davidson, unoriginality did not "constitute[] an impediment to … authority but instead facilitated its acquisition" (31): imitating adult styles enabled the young poet to explore the future experience of being a wife and mother, as well as to prove evidence of character traits that justified acquiring adult responsibility.

Chapters 2 turns from imitation to the authorizing uses of quotation by way of the commonplace book. Although commonplacing, or compiling and organizing quotes from one's reading, is often discussed in terms of information management, Stokes reminds readers that commonplace books were also used to further social mobility—and to dissuade young women from reading novels. Attending to writers including Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Hannah Crafts, Stokes argues that the strategic use of quotation and commonplacing helped legitimate the novel as a form while enabling authors on the social margins to enter the literary public sphere. As Stokes writes, forms including the epigraph allowed writers to "depict their works as continuations of—rather than dangerous threats to—literary tradition" (2021, 55). A somewhat rapid-fire final section of the chapter gestures to the importance of quotation in African American literary tradition, while also reflecting on the terror that quotation's evidentiary power could hold for the enslaved.

In Chapter 3, Stokes concludes her demonstration of unoriginality's value for nineteenth-century Americans by considering the act of rereading. Marrying close readings of texts, including advice manuals, with analyses of material reading practices, including rereading habits as visible in library borrowing records, Stokes argues that intensive reading came to be seen as a sign of prestige and mental discipline during a cultural moment marked by the increasing proliferation of new texts. Rereading not only offered an antidote to the perceived dangers of indiscriminate page-turning but also functioned as a mode of social advancement and undergirded the development of popular commercial forms such as the gift book. "Rereadability" (Stokes 2021, 97), meanwhile, came to signal literary quality, inaugurating a critical rubric that persists today.

While a broad range of writers, practices, and forms populate the first half of Old Style, the book's second half places more emphasis on individual authors, with the result that Stokes's last three chapters function as a cohesive demonstration of unoriginality's evolution into an instrument of "elite conservatism" (Stokes 2021, 9). Chapter 4 considers James Fenimore Cooper as the United States' most famous practitioner of the sequel. Stokes offers a new perspective on Cooper's well-established preservationist tendencies by asking how Cooper deploys the sequel as a literary form that encourages readers to "find pleasure in the familiar" (106). Concerned with what he perceived as a lack of continuity between the American past and present, Cooper used sequels to lament changes he found objectionable in American culture and to direct attention to the parts of history he wanted to preserve. In Chapter 5, Stokes analyzes how Henry Wadsworth Longfellow similarly deployed the unoriginal in his attempts to stall cultural change. By crafting his works to "resemble enduring historical artifacts that predated mass-produced print and had already been selected for preservation" (147), particularly through his use of the ballad form, Longfellow attempted to distance himself from trends in the literary marketplace—but instead earned censure for his imitations from critics including Margaret Fuller and Edgar Allan Poe. In Stokes's final chapter, on Atlantic Monthly editor Thomas Bailey Aldrich, she argues that the rise of literary realism following the US Civil War contributed to unoriginality's waning status. As Stokes demonstrates, Aldrich's adherence to literary convention and resistance to depicting social change in literature paired with a xenophobic white nationalist politics, confirming literary traditionalism's late-nineteenth-century status as an elite, out-of-touch style.

In Fair Copy, Jennifer Putzi likewise explores how nineteenth-century writers made strategic use of imitation. Yet while Stokes investigates unoriginality to renegotiate questions of literary authority, Putzi examines practices of copying to renegotiate the role of authorship itself. Fair Copy advances "a theory and methodology of relational poetics" that posits imitation and collaboration as crucial for understanding poems by nineteenth-century American women as well as the gendered material conditions of nineteenth-century US print culture. As Putzi argues, a relational poetics "privileges poems over poets, and publics … over individuals" (2021, 1), demanding the "contextual, archival readings" (13) that she herself deploys to trace how nineteenth-century American women entered into social, affective, and literary relations through their use of poetry.

In Chapter 1, Putzi examines the poetic practice of Lydia Hunt Sigourney, whose unofficial title of "the American [Felicia] Hemans" marked her as an imitator of the more famous English poet. Although Poe and other nineteenth-century American critics accused Sigourney of damaging the cause of national literature through her imitative and repetitive style, Putzi argues that Sigourney's relational poetics enabled her to foster "relationship[s] with her readers based on shared experiences and emotions" (2021, 39). As Putzi demonstrates, practices such as writing elegies on request enabled Sigourney to invite readers to inhabit and claim her poems for themselves, challenging Romantic notions of individual authorship. Meanwhile, in poems such as Sigourney's popular "Death of an Infant," which Putzi close-reads alongside its circulation history, Sigourney's use of repetition offers the poet artistic resources, capturing the "repetitive nature of child death" (47).

For the working women poets at the center of Chapter 2, imitation reflected social and literary ambitions as well as the desire to form community. The poems published in the Lowell Offering, a periodical written and edited by women working in New England textile mills, have been dismissed as derivative and inauthentic to the realities of working-class life. Yet as Putzi argues, Offering poets developed a relational poetics that "insist[s] on imitation as a way of reading and writing in a sustained and creative way" (2021, 62). Attending to the ways mill workers accessed texts—factory rules prohibiting books, for example, meant that clippings played a key role in shaping mill workers' literary culture—Putzi reframes Offering poetry as a window into its writers' complex engagements with print. Through compositional practices including paraphrasing poems already in circulation, mill workers imagined themselves in conversation with writers and readers across class lines, claiming their right to both print culture and poetry.

Although Chapter 3 focuses on a single poet, Sarah Louisa Forten, Putzi contends that features including Forten's use of pseudonyms and deployment of a collective "we" in her poems reflect a sense of authorship rooted in "collaboration, communal membership, and political advocacy" (2021, 18). Reading elegies and other works that Forten published in the abolitionist periodical the Liberator, Putzi explores how the poet both creates space for shared African American mourning within the antislavery movement and makes visible the "varied affiliations available to free Black Americans" (100) within national discourses about slavery, colonization, and citizenship. Putzi gives less attention to material textuality here than in other chapters, though her brief discussion of a Forten poem alongside its page layout in the Liberator (106) indicates promising opportunities for further study.

In Chapter 4, Putzi turns from periodicals to books, examining the relational poetics at work in the 1839 publication of Wales, and Other Poems. Although Welsh-born domestic servant Maria James wrote the poems, their appearance in book form depended on James's collaboration with her employer's daughter and a prominent Episcopal minister. As Putzi argues, Wales emphasizes that there is no such thing as an "unmediated working-class poetic voice" (2021, 129). James's access to print depended on patrons with the power to make circulation decisions. In her poetry itself, meanwhile, James appealed to members of her patrons' social networks by writing about places, events, and people they knew. If Wales reified class structures, Putzi shows, it also disrupted them, revealing James's embeddedness in the upper-class community she served.

Chapter 5 takes up the poem "Rock Me to Sleep" to reassess the value of relational poetics for midcentury American women who attempted to make professional careers as writers. First published by Elizabeth Akers Allen under a pseudonym in 1860, "Rock Me to Sleep" was enthusiastically reprinted, clipped, and copied in manuscript for years. Like Sigourney and many other poets Putzi discusses in Fair Copy, Akers Allen crafted a poem that invited her readers to inhabit its speaker position and take personal ownership of the text. Later faced with false claims to the poem's authorship, including one by a New Jersey legislator, Akers Allen eventually revealed herself as the author of "Rock Me to Sleep" and asserted her right to authorship by depicting herself as a working writer enmeshed in a professional network.

Putzi's conclusion reflects on the stakes of recovery through the lens of an acrostic poem written by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, a writer whose work on slavery and political themes has attracted increasing scholarly attention but whose more sentimental poems have gone overlooked. By composing an acrostic, a form that relies on reader recognition of convention, Harper directs attention beyond authorship and toward questions of audience and circulation—gesturing to the interpretive possibilities that open "if we place the unremarkable at the center of our recovery efforts" (Putzi 2021, 210).

Stokes's and Putzi's reconsideration of period-specific aesthetic criteria make Old Style and Fair Copy necessary reading for graduate students and scholars working in nineteenth-century US literature, and I predict both books will shape conversations in the field for years to come. The authors' calls to take the unoriginal, unremarkable, and imitative seriously, as well as their nuanced analyses of how artistic forms and material practices intersect, also have much to offer literary scholars working across historical time periods, as well as in cultural and media studies. (I can easily imagine, for example, Stokes's discussion of the sequel as a form that responds to rapid cultural change informing research on the reboot craze in contemporary American filmmaking.)

In some ways, the most powerful contributions of these books—and the ones most likely to serve College Literature readers—have less to do with past reading practices than the ways we read now. Despite ongoing interest in historical recovery and expanding the canon, scholars continue to favor works that anticipate modern aesthetic values. Yet as Stokes writes, the special status nineteenth-century Americanists confer to experimental authors such as Emily Dickinson make it hard to "reconstruct the period's own practices of reading and evaluation" (2021, 12). Seeking only the new, we can ignore the literature that mattered to past readers as well as other ways of thinking about literary progress. Indeed, as Stokes and Putzi emphasize, the overvaluing of artistic originality has long fueled the exclusion of writers of color and white women writers from literary history. In Old Style and Fair Copy, close reading the unoriginal and unremarkable becomes both a means to argument and an activist practice; Putzi is especially good at enacting recovery on the page, quoting (and analyzing) from her archive at length. Without ignoring the relevance of past writing for the present, Stokes and Putzi urge literary scholars to be more critical about how we assign aesthetic value and what rubrics—such as authorship—we use to think about literary production in the first place. These two books give us tools to think with: copy them.