MARIETTA MESSMER
READING NATIONAL AMERICAN LITERARY
HISTORIOGRAPHY INTERNATIONALLY
Approaching literary historiography as an "interested" and "useful" fiction (Perkins), and foregrounding the specific situatedness and narrative positioning of literary historians, this essay explores some of the narratives or "stories" emerging from American literary historiography, and in the process highlights some of the concomitant socio-cultural and political agendas underlying the construction of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century histories of North-American literature.
My explorations are guided by the central premise of the Inter-American section of the Center for Advanced Study on the Internationality of National Literatures at Göttingen (Germany) that many North and South American acts of cultural or literary identity-construction constitute intercultural / interliterary events that are characterized by the writers’ attempts at differentiating and dissociating themselves from the literatures of their respective former European colonial master. Such rhetorical acts of dissociation also form a constitutive element of nineteenth-century American literary historiography, and this essay sketches some of the rhetorical and discursive strategies utilized by these literary histories to negotiate various forms of literary and cultural internationality.
Drawing on a core corpus of 30 literary histories published between 1824 (John Neal, American Writers) and 1917 (Cambridge History of American Literature), I specifically concentrate on two interrelated questions: Part I of this study analyzes some of the ways in which American literary historiography as a discursive formation appropriates conceptual models and elements of European literary historiography while at the same time adapting them to specifically American conditions. My discussion focuses on three of the most influential examples, including Hippolyte Taine’s concept of "environment" / "milieu" as developed in his Histoire de la littérature anglaise (1863), which was functionalized to identify the specifically American qualities of American literature; Samuel Knapp’s appropriation of Simonde de Sismondi’s De la littérature du midi de l’Europe (1813) as a conceptual model for writing literary history that moves beyond the discourse of journalistic debate; and the adoption and adaption of the historia-litteraria concept in order to accommodate the perceived scarcity of pre-nineteenth-century American literature – as defined according to transnational aesthetic standards.
The second part of this essay attempts to distinguish different strategies of dissociation employed by various literary histories to not only foreground the national elements in American literary texts but at the same time also to systematically circumscribe or even erase their international – and, in particular, their British – references. In nineteenth-century literary histories, such discussions of American-British textual relations are characteristically reduced to and subsumed under the concept of "influence," which entails the hierarchically inflected notion of a monodirectional "flow" of literary materials down the cultural incline from the "provider" Great Britain to the "passive recipient" United States. Thus, while seemingly attempting to position American literature within an international context, these literary histories in fact actively engage in rhetorical attempts to delimit British influence. The forms of discursive control range from (1) acknowledging British models, to (2) amending British models, (3) reclaiming influence, (4) circumscribing influence, (5) negating influence, (6) privileging non-British influences, (7) re-evaulating influence, (8) reconceptualizing influence, and (9) reversing influence.