Canons by Consensus: Critical Trends and American Literature Anthologies (Amer Lit Realism & Naturalism) PDF
Preview Canons by Consensus: Critical Trends and American Literature Anthologies (Amer Lit Realism & Naturalism)
Canons by Consensus Studies in American Literary Realism and Naturalism series editor Gary Scharnhorst editorial board Louis J. Budd Donna Campbell John Crowley Robert E. Fleming Eric Haralson Katherine Kearns Joseph McElrath George Monteiro Brenda Murphy James Nagel Alice Hall Petry Donald Pizer Tom Quirk Jeanne Campbell Reesman Ken Roemer Susan Rosowski Canons by Consensus Critical Trends and American Literature Anthologies JOSEPH CSICSILA Foreword by Tom Quirk The University of Alabama Press Tuscaloosa Copyright © 2004 The University of Alabama Press Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380 All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Typeface: Minion ∞ The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Science–Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Csicsila, Joseph, 1968– Canons by consensus : critical trends and American literature anthologies / Joseph Csicsila ; foreword by Tom Quirk. p. cm. — (Studies in American literary realism and naturalism) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8173-1397-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. American literature—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 2. Literature publishing—United States. 3. Criticism—United States. 4. Anthologies—Editing. 5. Canon (Literature) I. Title. II. Series. PS25.C78 2004 810.9—dc22 2003027608 Sections of chapter four have appeared in Essays in Arts and Sciences (XXIX) October 2000 and Mark Twain Among the Scholars, ed. Richard Hill and Jim McWilliams. Albany, NY: Whitston Publishing Co., 2002. For Larry, Alan, and Joe Three wise men Contents Foreword by Tom Quirk ix Acknowledgments xiii Introduction xv 1. The Historical Context 1 2. Early- and Mid-Nineteenth-Century Prose: Irving, Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville 23 3. Nineteenth-Century Poetry: Whitman, Dickinson, Alice Cary, Phoebe Cary, Larcom, Thaxter, Lanier, Tabb 55 4. Post–Civil War Prose: Twain, Harte, Howells, James 86 5. Latter-Nineteenth-Century Prose: Stowe, Jewett, Freeman, Chopin 133 6. The African American Heritage: Equiano, Jacobs, Douglass, Dunbar, Chesnutt, Harper 166 7. Early-Twentieth-Century Women Writers: Wharton, Cather, Glasgow 181 Epilogue 207 Notes 211 Bibliography 233 Index 245 Foreword Tom Quirk Joseph Csicsila’s Canons by Consensus: Critical Trends and American Lit- erature Anthologies is an innovative piece of scholarship—provocative by implication, lucid in presentation, steady in judgment. What the author has done is to methodically drill test bores through strata of represen- tations of American literature in eighty-plus anthologies from 1919 to 1999. By restricting his focus to a limited, but still signi¤cant, number of American writers and tracing their critical fortunes through these class- room textbooks, he is able to contest and even contradict a number of rash assumptions about canon formation, including polemical accusa- tions of deliberate or inadvertent sexism and racism involving a long line of literary scholars and editors. No one in the future ought to be able to make overarching claims about the American literary canon without ¤rst checking out here the facts of the cases in question. For Csicsila’s book describes in empirical fashion just what those facts are. What is more, he charts the ®uctuations of literary reputation as they fared through three “generations” of anthologies. One risk the author ran in addressing the subject in these chronological layers was that his arguments would become repetitious as he traced author after author through generations of anthologies. But this is not the case. The prose is nuanced throughout and situates the critical trends within contempo-
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