Tara Stubbs

Introduction: The Idea of Influence in American Literature

An essay (or, indeed, an entire issue) dealing with the idea of influence in American literature predictably evokes Bloomian notions of ‘the anxiety of influence’, and, moreover, the anxiety of inherited influence — the theory that ‘American poets labour to “complete” their fathers’ in everything that they write and think (Bloom, 1997: 68). But what happens when one moves away from the apparent ‘anxiety’ that accompanies literary inheritance, and considers instead the many ways in which influence might liberate an American writer or offer new avenues of exploration? Paul Giles identifies in the work of American writers an active borrowing of influences in the pursuit of literary ideals; in Virtual Americas, for example, he discusses the ways in which ‘American writers from Herman Melville to Thomas Pynchon have compulsively appropriated and reinvented aspects of English culture to advance their own aesthetic designs’ (Giles, 2002: 1). What Giles’s reading tells us is that American writers have always crossed national and cultural lines in the pursuit of inspiration — perhaps because they have always known, or suspected, that such boundaries are artificial and shifting. Indeed, in American Crucible Gary Gerstle contends that nations themselves are merely constructs:

History And Art

Trevor Fawcett’s The Rise of English Provincial Art: Artists, Patrons, and Institutions outside London, 1800 – 1830 (1974) was groundbreaking in the way it rebalanced attention between the metropolis and the regions. In its wake a few studies of specific British provincial centres have appeared, but the only notable Irish investigation heretofore is Peter Murray’s Illustrated Summary Catalogue of the Crawford Municipal Art Gallery: Incorporating a Detailed Chronology of Art in Nineteenth-century Cork and Biographies of those Cork Artists Represented in the Collection (1991). Tackling the other end of the island, Dr Black, a curator of fine art at the Ulster Museum, deals with the context of the Belfast art world in general and the history of attempts to set up cultural institutions there in particular. This is on the grounds that a ‘skewed picture’ would emerge from a study restricted to the small number of artists active in the town in the period in question. The narrative starts in a somewhat barren period around 1760—the first fifty years are dealt with in fourteen pages. The earliest of the numerous plans for libraries, art galleries and art schools which came, sometimes briefly flourished, and then went, dates from the 1820s. Dr Black narrates the long series of ploys and pleas to establish such institutions. The turning point came in 1870 when a group of private subscribers scraped together the funds to establish a School of Art, the direct antecedent of the present School of Art and Design of the University of Ulster. The story finishes on a high point with the opening in 1888 of the Free Public Library, Art Gallery and Museum, the town becoming a city in the same year. A lot of ground is covered en route, including the emergence of Belfast artists, auctioneering, dealing, collecting and patronage and allied activities in the print trade. In the 1850s the development of art in Belfast was still poor. According to the 1851 census, Plymouth, with a population of 90,000, supported thirty-six artists but Belfast’s 103,000 only eight. In 1858 a touring exhibition of decorative art drew over 55,000 visitors in Dublin and 13,998 in Clonmel but only 3,322 in Belfast. A poor example was set by the caution of the Belfast civic authorities, summed up by Thomas Verner, the mayor in 1855. When other towns and cities were embracing the opportunity to set up libraries and galleries funded through the rates following the 1845 Museums Act, he declined to do so saying: ‘I should hesitate before I should call upon the inhabitants to tax themselves for the establishment of an Institution, however worthy of support.’ The spending of individual philanthropists may often have been directed to humanitarian rather than cultural needs but Belfast was an increasingly wealthy town: in 1855 the customs revenue was £363,000; by 1886 it was £1,635,000. Even the very rich such as Sir Edward Harland gave only small sums to encourage the fine and applied arts. Belfast must have envied the generous civic