J. Gerald Kennedy

Early-19th-Century Literature

This year has produced an unusual number of innovative, full-scale period studies that variously enlarge and complicate our understanding of American literature during the half-century between 1815 and 1865. Most explore projects or problems in which literary works (among other cultural forms) exemplify the sociological, political, and historical forces shaping antebellum America. Several deploy provocative new models of intertextuality, though in most cultural critique has altogether supplanted textual analysis as the compelling critical objective. One feels increasingly obliged to add the phrase ‘‘and culture’’ to this chapter’s title. Jürgen Habermas’s social theory informs several books and articles that gauge the emerging ‘‘public sphere’’ in the early Republic. Transnationalism bids to become the new orthodoxy; some exponents grant the ineluctability of national formations while others urge a postnational progressivism. As interest in broad cultural topics waxes, attention to certain individual authors has waned. Poe still attracts more critical and scholarly discussion than any other writer surveyed here, and the surge of interest in African American women writers seems conspicuous, while work on Stowe shows a slight decline from last year’s spike in activity, and studies of such once-popular authors as Irving and Longfellow have, it seems, all but ceased.