Introducing One’s Past
When my editor at Oxford University Press asked if I would write a substantial introduction to a new edition of Revolution and the Word, reframing it for this generation of readers, I had to consider what that might involve. When it appeared in 1986, Revolution and the Word was one of the first books to focus on the coemergence of the new U.S. nation and the new literary genre of the novel. It was an ambitious book. It analyzed the role played by literary culture in the urgent political and social debates in the early Republic and examined the role of the novel in the everyday lives of men and women of varying social classes. It was comprehensive in scope (mapping the full range of U.S. fiction written between 1789 and 1820) and method (moving from archival documents and even marginalia to current literary theory and social history). And it proposed a new way of looking at literature—a “history of texts” approach that brought together history of the book, reception studies, social history, historical materialism, and poststructuralist critical theory (including deconstructive ways of reading texts and subtexts). Since then, myriad books and articles have taken up various of these topics. Reintroducing Revolution and the Word would require an unusual intellectual exercise: I would have to historicize my own work and respond to these responses.
The prospect of return was daunting, and made more so by the fact that in the intervening years I have concentrated on other intellectual areas and historical periods in my research and teaching. As new arguments, theories, and archives emerge, a responsible scholar rethinks one’s own argument. I certainly have. So what would it mean, over fifteen years later, to reunite with a book to which I devoted the first decade of my academic career? I’ve never been to a class reunion, but I suspect the feelings aroused by such a conscious return to a previous era in one’s life are not dissimilar to those I felt upon revisiting Revolution and the Word.
It has been a fascinating, if humbling, experience. To reread one’s own work is to view one’s earlier self through the lens of all that has transpired. It requires contextualizing one’s own intellectual contribution within a specific critical moment. This is the opposite of nostalgia (which is memory without context). And it requires being receptive to (and again contextualizing) dozens of essays and books that take one’s ideas as a launching pad for different ideas, and then translating those insights as well.
I have spent the last two years reading work specifically related to the history and culture of the early national period and the origins of American fiction while continuing to pursue wide-ranging interdisciplinary scholarly interests that are key to my current position as vice provost for interdisciplinary studies and cofounder of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University. Putting these very different scholarly experiences together—specialized research in a foundational period in American political and cultural history and working to foster, institutionally, research across all of the departments and professional schools at a research university—has made me think about the intertwined networks of scholarship that contribute to any project. Writing the new introduction has made me think deeply once again about the scholars who influenced me during the decade in which I wrote Revolution and the Word as well as those whom I have read with excitement since the book’s publication. And reading different critics read my book has in turn helped me read other critics—a circular process, but not a trivial one.
To that end, the new introduction does several things. It provides a reconsideration of an older set of critical assumptions; it posits a new framework for thinking about the postrevolutionary era of American culture in the light of new scholarship and theories; and it stands back and asks a series of questions about the ways theories, fields, disciplines, canons, and archives are constructed and interpreted. Rather than re-address questions already discussed in detail in Revolution and the Word, I have tried to give readers glimpses into the process of history-and theory-making that is at the heart of all scholarship. The new introduction, in part, makes visible the workings of culture that contribute to education (in the varied senses of that word)—not only in the early national period but in the present social, political, and intellectual climate.
WHO WERE THE CRITICS who most influenced me in the process of writing Revolution and the Word? Even a glimpse at the endnotes to the original edition shows there are too many to mention by name. However, those who most shaped my thinking in the 1970s and 1980s when I was doing archival research on early American writers, readers, publishers, and educators shared my fascination with the relationship between political movements and cultural forms. To encompass that wide topic, Revolution and the Word combines various kinds of analysis—literary and historical, theoretical and archival, aesthetic and material, formal and sociological, text-based and reception-based. It draws overtly from and combines two different understandings of “culture”: what is often described as the “literary-moral” analysis of culture as well as the “anthropological explanation,” which sees culture (in the succinct summary of Janice A. Radway) as “the whole way of life of a historically and temporally situated people.”1 Especially in part two, Revolution and the Word owes much to the formalist tradition of close reading that was promoted by the New Critics and that continues to have an array of diverse proponents today.2 It is formalism motivated by the conviction—and here my chief influences are Mikhail Bakhtin and Fredric Jameson—that the novel as a genre can have political force that exceeds the specific politics of a given writer because its generic conventions allow multiple interpretations and different points of entry by a wide range of readers, including those with varying levels of literacy and education. The novel provides imaginative freedom that might not be otherwise available within a specific historical setting.3 Reader-response and reception theory (which were influential in the early 1980s) were also important to the close readings I performed. I extended the work on reception by searching for communities of early American readers and constructing an ethnography of eighteenth-century readership from evidence in publishers’ account books, lending library rosters, diaries, and letters. I found traces of readers in the marginalia or on the end papers of extant copies of the novels.4
Revolution and the Word embeds its aesthetic, generic, and formalist readings in the founding national moment of U.S. history and is thus indebted to research by myriad social historians of the early Republic. Conceptually, it owes a special debt to historical materialist and Marxist historians going back, in the American tradition, at least to Charles Beard’s landmark work An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913).5 It is influenced by the work of British historians, especially E. P. Thompson and, even more so, by Raymond Williams (considered by many to be one of the founders of cultural studies, who himself moved continuously between literary criticism and social history).6 In the final stages of preparing Revolution and the Word for publication, I found increasing affinities with new work emerging from the Birmingham school of cultural studies, in particular the writings of Stuart Hall and Dick Hebdige.7 Poststructuralist theory influenced my reading of culture and my assessment of how culture is read, especially Roland Barthes on the aesthetics and semiotics of popular culture, Michel Foucault on power and knowledge, and Jacques Derrida on deconstruction. Derrida’s practice of close reading for contradictory meanings within a single sentence or even word exploded the tired notion that reading produces one consistent and coherent interpretation or that one’s affective engagement in a sensational plot corresponds to the didactic message advanced by the same text. Deconstruction was instrumental to my discussions of the way a seemingly conservative text could have radical underpinnings (or vice versa).
Revolution and the Word would not have asked the questions it did were it not for the monumental work of the feminist historians and literary scholars who preceded me. I was influenced by Nina Baym, Nancy Cott, Linda Kerber, Gloria Hull, Annette Kolodny, Mary P. Ryan, Jane Tompkins, and many others who are cited in Revolution and the Word. 8 I was as inspired by their methods as their content, particularly in their relentless search for traces of women’s history in archives too often catalogued and collected patronymically. How do you track the accomplishments of a woman who disappeared once she took her husband’s name? When I began Revolution and the Word in 1976, very little work by early American women writers had been collected by libraries and even less had been catalogued. One went to the historical society that held the papers of the author’s father, and then one went to the historical society that held the papers of the author’s husband(s) and sometimes even to the archive that held the work of an author’s son. Often the author’s own contribution was not indexed in the description of the holdings. Nor were there very many cross-listings to the woman’s other contributions that might be included in papers under different male family names. The creation of the archive of women’s history is a major contribution made by feminist historians. I remain proud that Revolution and the Word and a companion series I edited, the Oxford University Press Early American Women Writers Series, were part of that process.
By combining these various scholarly influences, I argue in Revolution and the Word for a “history of texts” approach to the conundrum of the relationship of texts to history. I propose a view of literature that elaborates the social, political, material, legal, and intellectual conditions in which writers write, readers read, and printers publish books. I argue that as these conditions change so does the reading of texts (whether literary or political texts). And since development is always “uneven” (a Marxist term taken up brilliantly and extended to gender by Mary Poovey), there is a circularity since different ways of reading also influence, symbiotically, social, political, material, legal, and intellectual conditions as well.9 A book is more than what is caught on the printed page and larger than the space between its covers. So, in a way, a book (like its author) keeps evolving after its publication. New readers bring to the book the changing interests and tastes of their own critical moment.
That is true of any text whether it be an early American novel, the U.S. Constitution—or Revolution and the Word, for that matter. I may have sent my book out into the world on its own in 1986, but, in a sense, it has been evolving at the same time that I have because of the new interpretations subsequent readers bring to it. A specific example might be helpful here. Many of the first critics of Revolution and the Word saw it primarily as a book about the sentimental novel and a theory of women as readers and writers. This portion of the book is not the longest in terms of pages, but the book came out at the very height of debates on gender and was incorporated into those debates. Since then, different chapters of the book have been reprinted or translated. Interestingly, no one chose to reprint chapter 7, “The Picaresque and the Margins of Political Discourse,” until 2002—which saw two reprintings on different continents. It is as if suddenly that chapter has piped up and is being heard in a fresh way, no doubt because of postcolonial theory as well as general political events that have made many think hard about the role of culture in moments of overheated radical and reactionary politics (including the role of culture in democratic governance, free speech, and the interpretation of national and international law).
Scholarship is not stable. Nor should it be. It is as much a result of social, cultural, and material conditions as any other form of expression. If it were otherwise, libraries would contain only a few shelves, with one book on each subject, and students could educate themselves by reading those books instead of paying tuition to attend college or graduate school. Professors would not be required to do original research but to spout what had been said before. But no generation rests comfortably with the wisdom of its teachers. “History of ideas” as a field is based on the assumption that ideas constantly change as they are discussed, that thinkers develop in debate with one another. There is no need for a “scorched earth” policy toward one’s predecessors since it is a precondition of knowledge that we grow when we are challenged—a psychological truism as germane to intellectual exchange as it is to any other human relationship. The academic life is productive so long as we continue to understand knowledge as a process, not a product, to which we all differently contribute. In Foucault’s terms, a scholar’s work itself becomes an archive for future readers and other scholars. The archive itself—what is significant and what is not—changes over time.
Whether looking at early American studies at the present moment, at new developments in history of the book, or surveying significant developments in fields that have emerged or grown in prominence since the book’s publication, I have tried in the new introduction to paint an overview of major intellectual movements in the last decade and a half without becoming embroiled in particular arguments. I see this as a synthetic overview of the contingencies of knowledge production for early American studies and for intellectual life more generally. Thus my new introduction includes discussions of metasubjects such as “What Is a Field?”
Do I appreciate every work that has “taken on” Revolution and the Word since its publication? Of course not! But I hope that the new introduction makes clear its general appreciation for the richness, variety, depth, and significance of interdisciplinary humanities in the past fifteen years. During the decade when I was editor of American Literature, it was my job to read approximately four hundred submissions a year, including some submissions that began with one of the arguments made in Revolution and the Word. I learned enormously from those essays and, by extension, from the many critics, historians, and theorists who have written about either the early national period or the emergence of different fictional forms in the new Republic.
MY NEW INTRODUCTION covers some of the same ground as Revolution and the Word, but with a different intellectual map and, indeed, with new theoretical compass points. Issues that were hotly contested and that seemed essential when I was writing (female literacy rates, for example) seem less pressing in the wake of fifteen years of research on virtually every aspect of women’s expressive culture and social formation. New questions motivate my intellectual endeavors now (including the way the “separate spheres” model of male public and female private life continues to shape criticism and social life or the way racial assumptions permeate ideology even when there is no overt reference to race in a text).
There is also something of a shift in field focus between the new introduction and the original book. While I spent much of my time in writing Revolution and the Word in the archives, in the new introduction I have let the original archival discussions stand pretty much as they were in 1986. While an enormous amount of historical material has been brought to light in the past decades, my findings themselves have not changed (or been changed by other work) as significantly as my thinking about how to frame those findings. I have not found myself drawn to the archive to “redo” my past study. I’m allowing the original archival materials presented in Revolution and the Word to stand, with the invitation that others may interpret these materials anew. At this writing, I find myself most immersed in rethinking the relations of culture to politics in the light of a wealth of new theory—literary theory, anthropological theory, political economy, race theory, gender studies, cultural geography, social theory, world systems theory, postcolonial theory, political philosophy, critical legal theory, and on and on. The new introduction revisits Revolution and the Word and updates its theoretical implications.
Because of extensive analysis of nation building since the publication of Revolution and the Word, I also find myself returning to the relationship between the Constitution and the early novel. No doubt, there are other reasons, too, why I continue to find this aspect of Revolution and the Word compelling. The political use of the U.S. Constitution and arguments over the intentions of the Founding Fathers that have occurred in Congress and the Supreme Court throughout the 1990s and the early twenty-first century inspire me to revisit the points made in Revolution and the Word with new zeal.
In sum, Revolution and the Word in 2004 is a different book from what it was in 1986 because of the prodigious amount of research and writing that has taken place in those intervening years as well as changes in the larger society. In the pages to follow, I begin by reframing my discussion of the relationship of the new genre and the new nation in light of revisions in my own thinking about that relationship. I look at subfields such as sexuality studies and postcolonial studies that were nascent in the late 1970s and 1980s when I was writing but that have taken on major importance since. I also step back to look at more institutional issues of field and canon formation, interdisciplinarity, and future directions for the field. I see the following pages as a dialogue between myself as a critical reader writing in 2003 and the “author” of Revolution and the Word who in 1986 had not been able to avail herself of the riches in scholarship available to the present author.
WRITING THE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS to this edition of Revolution and the Word brings me special pleasure. The first edition of Revolution and the Word was dedicated to Russell B. Nye and Linda Wagner-Martin, colleagues who were also my mentors in my first tenure-track job at Michigan State University. Now, I dedicate this expanded edition to the thousands of students who, since I entered the profession, have challenged me to think ever more deeply over the years, beginning with my first doctoral student in early American studies, Dana D. Nelson. As is clear in the new introduction, Dana’s work has inspired much of my own rethinking of early American studies. So has the work of myriad subsequent students, including four superb women currently completing their Ph.D.s at Duke University: Monique Allewaert, Lauren Coats, Nihad Farooq, and Eden Osucha. My wonderful colleague Priscilla Wald suggested I invite these four to take part in a seminar with the focus of rereading Revolution and the Word and several early American novels in preparation for writing this new introduction. Over the past decade, I’ve read dozens of books and articles that referenced, agreed, disagreed with, or charted new territory away from Revolution and the Word, but, until that seminar, I had not gone back to read my own book. These brilliant and generous Americanists made the process of return more rewarding because more challenging than it otherwise would have been. If they are indicative of their generation, the future of our profession is in good hands. Since then, Monique, Eden, and Nihad have all worked as research assistants on this new edition. I am particularly indebted to them for their insights and their scholarly care.
My coeditor at American Literature, Michael Moon, was part of an ongoing dialogue on American culture for a decade. I cannot thank him enough for the many lunches over which we discussed our “editorial philosophy.” Srinivas Aravamudan, Houston Baker, Jamie Boyle, Larry Buell, Emory Elliott, Grant Farred, Fred Jameson, David Theo Goldberg, Inderpal Grewal, Larry Grossberg, Caren Kaplan, Karla Holloway, Ranji Khanna, Jill Lepore, Lisa Lowe, Wahneema Lubiano, Walter Mignolo, Chris Newfield, Charlotte Pierce-Baker, Jan Radway, Kristin Ross, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Laurie Shannon, Hortense Spillers, and Robyn Wiegman are among the many colleagues with whom I’ve exchanged ideas about literature, politics, and culture in the course of writing the new introduction. Peter Lange has been a dynamic boss and spirited colleague during my years as an administrator; Nan Keohane has been an inspiring leader, in ways large and small. My friend and writing partner, Alice Kaplan, has read and commented with her usual intelligence, eloquence, and care on several drafts of the new introduction. It is almost miraculous to think that we have been reading and responding to one another’s work for over a decade. Charles Davidson learned to spot duodecimos and to operate a microfilm printer in his youth, both of which contributed to the first edition of Revolution and the Word. He and his wife Susan Brown and their family now teach me as much as they may learn. Finally, I thank Ken Wissoker, who, in his attention to the new introduction, combined the skills and knowledge of a professional editor with his unequaled tenderness, support, and love for this author. It was my friend Bob Keohane who recently told me that, when he was still a preschool child, someone asked him what he wanted when he grew up, and he answered, “Love and happy work.” Those are fine words to live by—and never to be taken for granted when achieved.
Notes
1. Janice A. Radway, introduction to the second edition of Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1991), p. 3. In her introduction, Radway notes that, because of the exceptionalist tendencies of American studies programs, she was not influenced by the British cultural studies traditions with which her work has clear affinities. Interestingly, for early Americanists, the influence of British scholarship and models tends to be very strong. As a student of early America, my primary texts were works by John Locke, David Hume, all of the major and minor British novelists, essayists, and poets, and the Scottish Common Sense philosophers. My scholarly models were also largely British and European—walking in the footsteps of E. P. Thompson rather than Vernon Parrington. My understanding of culture owes much to Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1958).
2. For superb examples of formalist criticism (from Cleanth Brooks to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Homi Bhabha), see Frank Lentricchia and Andrew DuBois, eds., Close Reading: The Reader (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2003).
3. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1981), and Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text, 1 (Winter 1979), 130–48, and The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981).
4. For an extended and comprehensive account of scholarly uses of marginalia in different fields, see H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2000). Robert Darn ton has made elegant interpretations of marginalia in a number of his contributions to the history of the book and reading. See especially The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (New York: Norton, 1990) and The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Penguin, 1984). See also Guglielmo Cavallo, Roger Chartier, and Lydia G. Cochrane, A History of Reading in the West (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1999), and Chartier, Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codes to Computer (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1995).
5. Charles Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1913).
6. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon Books, 1963); Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), Keywords (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976), and The Long Revolution (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1961).
7. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979); Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and the Centre: Some Problematics and Problems,” in Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79 (London: Hutchinson, 1980), and “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms,” Media, Culture and Society, 2 (1980), 52–72.
8. Nina Baym, Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–1870 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1978); Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: ‘Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977); Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1980); Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave (New York: Feminist Press, 1982); Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1975); Mary P. Ryan, Womanhood in America, from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975); and Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985).
9. Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid- Victorian England (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988).
Literature is a luxury. Fiction is a necessity.
—G. K. Chesterton