South of the American Renaissance

The Simms Reader: Selections from the Writings of William Gilmore Simms. Edited by John Caldwell Guilds. University Press of Virginia, 2001

The Wigwam and the Cabin: Selected Fiction of William Gilmore Simms. Edited by John Caldwell Guilds. University of Arkansas Press, 2000

An Early and Strong Sympathy: The Indian Writings of William Gilmore Simms. Edited by John Caldwell Guilds and Charles Hudson. University of South Carolina Press, 2003

Why Simms? The recovery of forgotten or neglected writers from the past has been one of the most visible trends in post-1960s literary studies. But from Kate Chopin to William Wells Brown, these reclaimed writers have typically represented historically marginalized groups. Their republication has been central to the establishment of various progressive movements in the academy, such as women's studies and African-American studies. Scholars in these emerging fields needed to create basic canons of writers who would serve as legitimate objects of study. In addition, bringing such writers back into print made it possible to offer undergraduate and graduate courses in these fields. For these sound reasons, the republication of neglected writers has almost always served a foundational purpose in legitimating self-consciously political, often insurgent academic fields.

What, then, are we to make of the quiet effort currently underway to bring back into print an extensive selection of the writings of William Gilmore Simms? Sometimes called the "Cooper of the South," Simms was a proslavery South Carolinian whose historical romances, literary criticism, and social and political commentary seem distinctly out of place in the company of other recovered nineteenth-century authors. Consider the following lines: "Democracy is not levelling—it is, properly defined, the harmony of the moral world. It insists upon inequalities, as its law declares, that all men should hold the place to which they are properly entitled. The definition of true liberty, is the undisturbed possession of that place in society to which our moral and intellectual merits entitle us" (Simms Reader 246). Such sentiments are unlikely to find Simms many champions in the contemporary academy (though a few skeptics might note certain painful similarities between Simms's views and those of John Winthrop expressed in "A Model of Christian Charity," itself a staple of survey courses in American literature). Not only is Simms, by contemporary standards, an unapologetic reactionary, but his books do not serve the needs of any emergent field, and the fact that most of his reissued work is appearing only in hardcover makes it unsuitable for course adoption. Moreover, as John Caldwell Guilds notes in his preface to The Simms Reader, "[t]he reader who cares to know Simms faces not the prospect of reading a volume or two—for Simms has no universally renowned masterpiece to certify him in quick time—but the more daunting challenge of plowing through a whole bevy of books admittedly imperfect that, taken as a whole, reveal an author whose achievement is prodigious" (ix). While Lydia Maria Child's Hobomok (1824) or Catharine Sedgwick's Hope Leslie (1827) lend themselves to a week of class or a tightly focused article, Simms's interest can only really be discovered in his collective output.

Despite the theoretical implausibility of Simms's republication, however, we are confronted with the material fact of at least a dozen volumes of Simms's writings currently in print, with more on the way, and a growing body of critical studies and essay collections extending itself across library shelves. All this in an era when academic presses are cutting back their humanities lists in response to draconian budget reductions. We might well ask what motivates this project, what interests it serves, and why we are getting Simms—so very much Simms—at this point in our history.

It is worth noting that all three of the collections under review in this essay have been brought out by Southern university presses: Virginia, South Carolina, and Arkansas. Indeed, The Wigwam and the Cabin is the 10th volume of the...