Carolyn L. Karcher

Reconceiving nineteenth-century American literature: the challenge of women writers : Repositionings: multiculturalism, American literary history, and the curriculum

Although the past ten years have seen a whole pantheon of American women writers resurrected from obscurity, a thoroughgoing reconceptualization of American literature itself has been slow to follow, and the paradigms that have dominated our literary history for nearly half a century have clung tenaciously to life. These paradigms can be summarized as follows. First, American writers have persistently shied away from the realistic depiction of society, choosing instead to work in the mode of what Hawthorne called the romance-a mode best suited to probing the individual psyche. Second, even when they have critiqued their society, they have done so from the perspective of alienated artists or transcendental prophets, rather than of active reformers, and they have recurrently turned from the specter of political conflict to the vision of communion with nature. Third, American writers have chafed under the censorship imposed by a prudish female audience-a censorship that has severely restricted the literary representation of sexuality and the exploration of both heterosexual love and tabooed sexual relations.1 Underlying the continuing failure to rethink paradigms based largely on a (white) male canon is the assumption that men are more prone than women to tackle mighty themes, while women, conversely, are more prone to concentrate on private, domestic, and ultimately trivial mat-