Linck Johnson
“In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?” the English critic and essayist Sydney Smith contemptuously asked in 1820 (79). Ironically, by the time Smith’s scathing critique of the shallowness of American culture appeared in the Edinburgh Review, the first American work of imaginative literature to garner widespread international attention, Washington Irving’s The Sketch‐Book, was already appearing in installments in the United States; and a complete, two‐volume edition was soon published to great acclaim in London. Within a few decades books by American authors were read, not only at home and in Great Britain, but in translation throughout Europe and around the world, in the case of popular writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mark Twain. Indeed, during the period 1820–1914 American literature came of age, and this volume offers a rich and illuminating survey of that process, from the achievements of a wide range of antebellum authors through diverse writings published during the equally turbulent period between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War I in Europe.
The development of American literature was closely related to the growth of the literary marketplace in the United States. As Susan Belasco details in Chapter 1, that growth during the antebellum period was spurred by a number of factors. The demand for books and periodicals was fueled by rising literacy rates and an expanding network of circulating libraries. Readers benefited from improvements in eyeglasses and lamps, while the production of printed materials was increased by other technological advances, especially new techniques in paper production and the invention of faster printing presses. At the same time, the rapid expansion first of the canal system and later of railroads enabled publishers to distribute their goods to all parts of the country. Initially, the production of books lagged behind that of periodicals, which, as Margaret Fuller noted in 1846, “send their messages to every corner of this great land and form, at present, the only efficient instrument for the education of the people” (1846: 137–138). However, the literary marketplace was transformed, during the 1850s, by the publication of a series of blockbusters, including Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and popular domestic novels such as Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850) and Maria Susanna Cummins’s The Lamplighter (1854).
Although American authors of the period could for the first time hope to make a living by writing, they nonetheless faced significant challenges. One was discovering adequate materials in what many viewed as a country lacking a rich culture and a long history. “I visited various parts of my own country; and had I been merely a lover of fine scenery, I should have felt little desire to seek elsewhere its gratification: for on no country have the charms of nature been more prodigally lavished,” Irving famously observed in “The Author’s Account of Himself,” at the opening of The Sketch‐Book.
But Europe held forth all the charms of storied and poetical association. There were to be seen the masterpieces of art, the refinements of highly‐cultivated society, the quaint peculiarities of ancient and local custom. My native country was full of youthful promise: Europe was rich in the accumulated treasures of age. Her very ruins told the history of the times gone by, and every mouldering stone was a chronicle. I longed to wander over the scenes of renowned achievement – to tread, as it were, in the footsteps of antiquity – to loiter about the ruined castle – to meditate on the falling tower – to escape, in short, from the common‐place realities of the present, and lose myself among the shadowy grandeurs of the past.
(1996: 12–13)
As that passage reminds us, although its two most famous stories (“Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”) were set in the United States, most of Irving’s sketches in the volume described life and tourist haunts in England, such as Westminster Abbey and Stratford‐upon‐Avon. During his extended stay in Europe, Irving continued to explore its culture and history in collections such as Braceridge Hall (1822), Tales of a Traveller (1824), and The Alhambra (1832). After his return to the United States in 1832, however, he swiftly turned his attention to the American scene, beginning with his popular account of his month‐long trip across present‐day Oklahoma, A Tour on the Prairies (1835). As Susan Roberson illustrates in Chapter 2, Irving thus discovered what many other nineteenth‐century American writers would also come to know, that they could reap rich rewards by offering accounts of the life and landscape of various parts of the country, especially the exotic South and the ever‐shifting terrain of what constituted the “West.” During the following decades a host of writers including Caroline Kirkland, Margaret Fuller, Francis Parkman, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Mark Twain offered vivid portraits of the Midwest, Great Plains, Rocky Mountains, and Pacific Northwest at times when those areas were virtually unknown to readers in the East.
American writers also adapted successful British genres to their own ends. As travel writers were beginning to record the transformation of country, offering glimpses of its future, other writers explored its past through works in another popular genre, the historical romance, which Monika Elbert and Leland Person take up in Chapter 3. The father of the genre was the British novelist Sir Walter Scott, who explored various periods of Scottish history in his phenomenally popular “Waverly Novels” (1814–1832). In the novels of his American followers such as James Fenimore Cooper, “the American Scott,” Native Americans essentially took the place of the noble but primitive Scottish Highlanders, doomed to defeat by the forces of English progress. Indeed, the historical romances of Cooper and writers such as Lydia Maria Child and Catharine Maria Sedgwick essentially justified the dispossession and ultimate destruction of Native Americans. Nathaniel Hawthorne explored a different aspect of colonial history, “the sins of the fathers,” the Puritan founders of New England, in his historical romances The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851). As J. Gerald Kennedy elucidates in Chapter 4, in Hawthorne’s earlier stories about colonial New England he used the devices of yet another popular British genre, the gothic tale, to exorcise his remorse about the atrocities committed by the Puritans. In contrast, Irving tended to undercut the horrific elements of his several gothic tales, often through the use of humor. The major American practitioner of such tales was Edgar Allan Poe, who adapted gothic types and tropes to explore the complexities of the human unconscious in a wide range of stories, including those set in Europe, such as “Ligeia” (1838) and “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), and in a later series set in the United States.
Those tales found a ready outlet in the proliferating periodicals of the antebellum period, through which many young writers first gained an audience. In her overview of Transcendentalism in Chapter 5, Phyllis Cole emphasizes that the movement had complex origins and a long history that was shaped by the writings and activities of many figures, both men and women. But a crucial moment in its history was the establishment in 1840 of The Dial, a journal first edited by Margaret Fuller and later by Ralph Waldo Emerson. The two leaders of the movement published some of their seminal works in the journal, including Fuller’s “The Great Lawsuit,” which she later expanded into her influential feminist manifesto, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). The short‐lived journal also provided a venue for promising younger writers such as Henry David Thoreau, whose earliest essays appeared in The Dial. After it ceased publication in 1844, Thoreau turned to writing the only two books he published during his lifetime, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and Walden (1854). The latter is now widely recognized as a foundational text in the environmental movement, and in Chapter 6 Rochelle Johnson demonstrates the ways in which Thoreau’s writings are noteworthy both within his historical context and for their impact on later environmental writers and thinkers. As Johnson also indicates, however, Thoreau was hardly a voice crying in the wilderness – or, in his case, for the wilderness – since early voices in literary environmentalism also included a number of his contemporaries such as Susan Fenimore Cooper, whose famous book Rural Hours (1850) reached a far larger audience than Walden.
In fact, the writers who later came to be viewed as the major authors of the period were by no means the most popular writers of what F.O. Matthiessen designated the American Renaissance (1941). Matthiessen’s literary Mount Rushmore consisted of five authors, all men: Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman. With the exception of Emerson, who was a successful lecturer, none of those writers achieved sustained commercial success. Melville burst upon the literary scene with his wildly popular debut novel, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), and its alluring sequel, Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847). As David Dowling discusses in Chapter 7, however, those works initiated a turbulent, decade‐long contest between Melville and the audience he sometimes courted and other times execrated. Following the disastrous critical reception of his works Mardi (1849), Moby‐Dick (1851), and Pierre (1852), Melville sought to evade critics and regain his audience by writing magazine fiction, including a serialized novel and novellas such as “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853) and “Benito Cereno” (1855); but his literary career effectively ended with the publication of his enigmatic final novel, The Confidence‐Man (1857).
The writings of Melville and other “classic” authors were overshadowed by popular works of what his friend Hawthorne in a now‐infamous 1855 letter to his publisher angrily dismissed as “a d‐‐‐‐d mob of scribbling women,” who dominated the literary marketplace in the 1850s (Hawthorne 1987: 304). The range and nature of their writings are explored in Chapter 8 by Nicole Tonkovich. As she notes, although the feminist recovery of writings by women is far from complete, it has revealed a body of work that differs sharply from the ways in which it was characterized by earlier male critics, who tended to dismiss it as sentimental and domestic. In fact, sentiment was often checked by gritty realism; and many of the so‐called domestic fictions were set in cities, places of peril for unprotected women. They were also places where an educated woman could earn a living by writing, especially for newspapers, as does the heroine of a bestselling novel that Hawthorne exempted from his sweeping dismissal of women’s fiction, Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall (1855).
Like most successful fiction writers, most poets first wrote for periodicals, which strongly shaped the national literary identity. Throughout the nineteenth century that identity was also formed by anthologies of American poetry, which Amanda Gailey exhibits in Chapter 9. Early anthologies tended to be inclusive, efforts simply to affirm the fact that the country had a literature; later volumes became more selective, influencing both the tastes and gendered expectations of readers. Although much of the poetry women published in periodicals engaged current issues, the selections in anthologies cast their verse as primarily domestic and reflective. Men came to dominate anthologies, which established the reputations and centrality of the “Fireside Poets” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Cullen Bryant, Robert Lowell, and John Greenleaf Whittier. But their contemporary Walt Whitman was represented by his most conventional poems, notably the ubiquitous “O Captain, My Captain” (1865), one of his elegies for President Abraham Lincoln.
Whitman and the other major poet of the period, Emily Dickinson, followed radically different paths. Edward Whitley in Chapter 10 traces the arc of Whitman’s literary career, emphasizing the various ways in which the poet’s career‐long project, Leaves of Grass, was a product of New York City. Whitman began writing as an urban journalist, and the life and rhythms of the city became vital elements in his evolving book of poems, the first edition of which was published in 1855. Whitman also skillfully negotiated the shifting terrain of publishing in the city, making contacts among the literati that helped pave the way for numerous later editions of Leaves of Grass. In contrast, Emily Dickinson chose not to publish. That decision has most often been characterized as a private rebellion against the pressures and restrictions of the literary marketplace, freeing Dickinson to undertake her radical poetic experiments in the isolation of her home in Amherst, Massachusetts. As Elizabeth A. Petrino argues in Chapter 11, however, Dickinson was deeply concerned with broader social and cultural issues, and both those concerns and her formal experimentation were common among other nineteenth‐century female poets, including Lydia Sigourney, Emma Lazarus, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Rose Terry Cooke, Helen Hunt Jackson, Sarah Piatt, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.
Both poets and prose writers were engaged in the numerous reform movements of the antebellum period. The literature of some of the most pressing reforms is the focus of my analysis in Chapter 12. Through his sermons and writings, William Apess led a lonely crusade against the pervasive racism directed at Native Americans, whose cause gained more widespread sympathy during the forced removal of the so‐called Five Civilized Tribes – the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole – from their ancestral homelands east of the Mississippi River to reservations in “Indian Territory,” present‐day Oklahoma. The suffering of industrial workers during the nearly decade‐long depression following the Panic of 1837 inspired early advocates of labor such as George Ripley, the founder of Brook Farm, and the radical Jacksonian social critic and novelist George Lippard, author of the bestselling novel Quaker City (1845). Temperance was the subject of innumerable tracts and lectures, as well as autobiographies, novels, and popular plays; and several women who were involved in the crusade against liquor became leaders of the nascent women’s rights movement, which found expression in some of the most challenging texts of the period, including Mary Lyndon (1855), an autobiographical novel by Mary Gove Nichols. She is also one of the figures discussed in Chapter 13, in which David Greven explores the interactions between imaginative literature and the writings of health and sex reformers such as Sylvester Graham and his disciple Nichols. As Greven demonstrates, the human body became a crucial battleground during the turbulent decades before the Civil War, and debates over gender, race, and sexuality left their mark on texts ranging from Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826) through tales by Poe and Hawthorne to Harriet Spofford’s provocative short story “Circumstance” (1860).
Constructions of race and gender, the body and sexuality, were integral to the debate over slavery, which came to overshadow all other issues during the 1850s. Susan Ryan considers some of the key texts in that decades‐long debate in Chapter 14. Although a number of colonial writers had spoken out against slavery, antislavery rhetoric intensified during the 1820s, culminating in David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829). That radical document ushered in a new and far more militant phase of the antislavery crusade, which was carried forward by many other writers, black and white, including prominent abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison. But the bestselling and most influential antislavery text was Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which generated countless adaptations and spin‐offs in the North, as well as a furious counterattack by southern writers, who wrote a number of “anti‐Tom novels,” notably Mary Henderson Eastman’s Aunt Phillis's Cabin; or, Southern Life As It Is (1852). Those contending texts were primarily designed to win the hearts and minds of white, middle‐class northerners, who were also the target audience of the Narrative of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). As Philathia Bolton and Venetria K. Patton illustrate in Chapter 15, such slave narratives were carefully crafted to appeal to the cultural and domestic values of that audience, as well as its assumptions about the proper role of women, as embodied in what came to be known as the “cult of true womanhood.” The debate over slavery generated some of the greatest speeches delivered during the golden age of American oratory, the subject of Chapter 16, in which John C. Briggs analyzes the rhetoric of some of the renowned speakers of the antebellum period, from abolitionists to politicians such as Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John C. Calhoun. But standing apart from and above even those formidable figures was Abraham Lincoln, whose powerful conception of an embodied republic animated his great series of addresses on the eve of and during the Civil War.
That brutal conflict had a profound impact on both literature and the literary marketplace. In Chapter 17, Shirley Samuels illuminates the ways in which the disruptions caused by the war persisted in the American imagination long after it ended in 1865. The devastation of both bodies and landscapes during the conflict led to a reconceptualization of the relation of humans to the natural world that informs descriptions in fictions ranging from John William De Forest’s Miss Ravenal’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867) to Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895). As such works suggest, in response to the war writers of fiction turned from romance to realism, while instead of writing national epics poets expressed national mourning in short lyrics such as those in Whitman’s Drum‐Taps (1865) and Melville’s Battle‐Pieces and Aspects of War (1866), as well as in Dickinson’s brooding poems on the subject of death, which have recently come to be understood as expressions of the deep sorrow experienced throughout New England. Women made significant contributions to the war effort and to the literature of the war, through vivid works such as Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches (1863); and the trauma of the war radically altered cultural conversations about disability, which Mary Klages explores in Chapter 18. During the antebellum period, depictions of disability were often sentimental or pathetic, designed to elicit compassion and philanthropy. Although such depictions persisted, questions about the place of the disabled in American society were made far more urgent by the war, during which amputation was the most common form of surgery. An estimated 45 000 soldiers survived the loss of at least one limb, and the issue of whether and how they and other disabled veterans could be integrated into domestic and public life shaped numerous stories, while Ambrose Bierce used a mute child’s disability to heighten the impact of his stark war story “Chickamauga” (1889).
The literary marketplace developed rapidly during the decades following the Civil War. As Bill Hardwig details in Chapter 19, the industrial economy of the North continued to expand, triggering profound changes in the production and dissemination of printed materials that in turn opened up new literary opportunities for women and working‐class writers. Periodicals evolved as elite journals such as the Atlantic Monthly were challenged by mass‐market magazines like Cosmopolitan and the Ladies Home Journal. Sales consequently increased dramatically: while the population of the country doubled between 1865 and 1900, the circulation of all monthly periodicals rose from four million in 1865 to 64 million in 1905. The serialization of novels, formerly something of a rarity in the United States, became ever more common, even as technology made it affordable to produce different forms of genre or “pulp” fiction, including detective stories, the Western, and boys’ fiction, notably Horatio Alger’s famous “Ragged Dick” series. The first of those, Ragged Dick (1868), was subtitled “Street Life in New York with the Boot Blacks,” and much of pulp fiction focused on crime‐ridden urban areas in the East. At the same time, a staple of highbrow literary magazines was what is variously called regional or local color fiction, which Anne Boyd Rioux surveys in Chapter 20. The popular genre attracted a wide range of writers, including Bret Harte, whose “The Luck of Roaring Camp” (1868) and other stories from California created a seemingly endless demand for accounts of life in locales far removed from the urban East. Some of the most popular writings about the South were nostalgic evocations of life before the war, such as the Uncle Remus stories of Joel Chandler Harris and the stories collected in Thomas Nelson Page’s In Ole Virginia (1887), which established the plantation myth that Charles Chesnutt challenged in his subversive plantation stories such as those collected in The Conjure Woman (1899). But the field of regional writing was dominated by women, among them Mary Austin in the West, Kate Chopin in the South, and the foremost local color writers of New England, Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman.
With its use of speech dialects and local customs, as well as its emphasis on the quotidian details of life, regionalism may be understood as a branch of realism, the dominant literary mode during the period 1865–1914. In Chapter 21, Nadia Nurhussein points out that although much of the magazine verse of the period epitomized the “genteel” style of poets like the ubiquitous sonneteer Clinton Scollard, such work increasingly competed with the popular dialect verse of James Whitcomb Riley, the “Hoosier” poet from Indiana; and Paul Laurence Dunbar, the son of former slaves whose dialect poems for the most part conformed to the nostalgic plantation myth of the old South. But he also wrote a powerful anti‐lynching poem, “The Haunted Oak” (1900), while Sarah Piatt addressed a range of issues, including grinding urban poverty, and Edward Markham exposed the harsh lot of rural laborers in his famous “Man with a Hoe” (1899). That turn toward realism, which was also illustrated by the often‐grim early verse of Edwin Arlington Robinson, was even more pronounced in fiction. In his overview of realism at the opening of Chapter 22, Alfred Bendixen explains that the country’s experience of the trauma of the Civil War made it resistant to the elevated language, remote locales, extraordinary situations, and heroic individualism that often characterized romantic fiction. Instead, the style, setting, plot, and depiction of character in realistic fiction reflected a desire for writing that focused on what the influential editor, critic, and novelist William Dean Howells described as “the truthful treatment of material.” Howells was the chief originator and theorist of American realism, a fictional mode that proved to be deeply congenial to women writers such as Edith Wharton, whose works at once represented the culmination of and the various directions open to realism.
The range and complexity of the mode is also displayed by the works of what are usually considered the major novelists who worked within the broad parameters of American realism, Mark Twain and Henry James. In Chapter 23, Andrew Levy revises the traditional view of Twain as a “quintessentially American” figure, one whose signal achievement was his masterpiece Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). Now, a good deal of attention has shifted to later works such as Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), a novel in which his treatment of race seems strikingly modern. In recent scholarship Twain has also emerged as a far more complicated literary and national figure: a fiction writer, yes, but also the author of progressive essays on society and politics, as well as some richly ironic non‐fictional narratives, including his first full‐length narratives, The Innocents Abroad (1869) and Roughing It (1872). The latter is an account of his trip to the West, the archetypal American journey; but the former is an account of a guided tour to Europe and the Holy Land, a reminder that Twain, who was ostensibly so deeply rooted in his native soil, loved to travel abroad, where he spent much of his adult life. In his own way, he was every bit as cosmopolitan as his contemporary Henry James, who was educated in both Europe and the United States, and who settled permanently in London relatively early in his career, in 1876. In his overview of James’s career in Chapter 24, John Carlos Rowe charts the development of what is known as the “the international theme” – the relationship between naive or uncultured Americans and sophisticated Europeans (or Europeanized Americans) – that constituted a central drama in James’s novels, from the earliest through the major works of his middle period, such as The Portrait of a Lady (1881), to the celebrated novels of his “Major Phase,” The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). Through readings of those and other key texts, Rowe challenges the earlier view of James as an aloof literary formalist, revealing instead an experimental writer of fiction and non‐fiction who was deeply attuned to the social issues of his and our time, from women’s and gay rights to immigration, ethnic diversity, and class mobility.
Despite the potential reach of realism, many writers of the period considered it an inadequate vehicle for the exploration of the darker sides of human behavior and social life. As Donna Campbell indicates in Chapter 25, naturalists such as Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London were united in their determination to expose the underlying truth rather than what they dismissed as the superficial accuracy of the realists. That determination frequently led them to transgress literary conventions, especially in their treatment of subjects such as violence and sexuality. Where realists such as Howells, Wharton, and James tended to focus on middle‐class life or upper‐class society, the naturalists often turned their attention to the sordid conditions in urban slums, the setting of Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), or to working‐class life, as in the opening chapters of Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900). Wherever their fictions were set, however – from Crane’s Bowery to Norris’s California and from Dreiser’s sprawling Chicago to London’s Yukon Territory – the characters in naturalistic fictions are driven and often overwhelmed by forces beyond their control – social, hereditary, environmental, and economic. The growing gap between wealth and poverty also gave renewed force and focus to social protest fiction, the subject of Chapter 26. In it, Alicia Mischa Renfroe highlights two major stands of such fiction, one emerging in the realist and naturalist novel, as represented by Rebecca Harding Davis’s groundbreaking novella “Life in the Iron‐Mills” (1861) and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906); and the other in utopian fiction, including such notable works as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1887) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915).
Even as the literature of the period exposed some of the glaring inequalities of American society, it also began more fully to reflect the rich diversity of life in the United States. As James Nagel points out in Chapter 27, more than 30 million people came to the country during the last decades of the nineteenth century, dramatically transforming American life and culture. The immigrant experience was dramatized in numerous works, including an important American novel that has often been overlooked because it was first published in Norwegian, Druge Krog Janson’s A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter (1888). Other treatments of immigrant life in cities included Abraham Cahan’s novel Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896); Sui Sin Far’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912), a collection of stories about Chinese immigrants in Seattle and San Francisco; and Mary Antin’s bestselling autobiography, The Promised Land (1912). At the same time, Willa Cather began writing about life in the mixed immigrant communities on the prairie in stories and in her early novel O Pioneers! (1913). All of those works implicitly raised the question of what it meant to be an American, a question with which African American writers also grappled during the era of Jim Crow, the system of segregation and discrimination that followed the end of Reconstruction in 1877. In Chapter 28, Shirley Moody‐Turner explores the concept of “double consciousness,” which in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) W.E.B. Du Bois famously defined as a sense of internal division that made it impossible for African Americans to unify their black identity with their American identity. As Moody‐Turner demonstrates through a reading of texts by Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Anna Julia Cooper, Pauline Hopkins, and James Weldon Johnson, the concept of the double consciousness offered such writers a way of expressing the unique position of African Americans at once within and apart from society in the United States.
During the nineteenth century and especially after the Civil War, other marginalized groups also secured an expanded place in “American” literature. In Chapter 29, Cari M. Carpenter discusses the work of three of the most well‐known Native American women writers who emerged during the decades following the war – the Northern Piute writer and activist Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins; Alice Callahan (Muscogee Creek), author of Wynema: A Child of the Forest (1891), the first‐known novel by a Native American woman; and Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Yankton Sioux), better known by her pen name Zitkala‐Ša or “Red Bird.” Their rich and varied works illustrate the various ways in which Native American writers responded to the disruptions in Indigenous lives caused by some of the convulsive events of the dark period, from the Dawes Act (1887), which resulted in the tremendous loss of Indian land, through brutal Indian–US army encounters such as the massacre at Wounded Knee, to the establishment of Indian boarding schools designed to eradicate Native American culture. Adopting complex, often seemingly irreconcilable tactics, including the use of anger, sentimentality, and humor, the three writers developed a powerful rhetoric of resistance, thus continuing the work of earlier nineteenth‐century predecessors such as William Apess.
As Jesse Alemán reveals in Chapter 30, during the nineteenth century Latina/os produced and circulated their work across national borders and throughout the United States, for the most part in Spanish. Such works helped spread revolutionary rhetoric across the Americas, but for many writers the view of the United States as a model republic was shattered by the US–Mexico War of 1846–1848. The following decade, part of what in American literary history is called the antebellum period, thus marked for Mexican America a painful postbellum aftermath of that war, at the end of which Mexico was forced to yield nearly half of its territory to its expansionist neighbor. One of the most remarkable participants in the American Civil War was the cross‐dressing Loreta Janeta Velazquez, a Cuban who fought for the Confederacy disguised as Lt. Harry T. Buford and later published her autobiography, The Woman in Battle (1876). An even more prominent Latina voice was that of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, the first Mexican‐American woman to publish novels in English: a satirical Civil War narrative, Who Would have Thought It? (1872); and a novel exposing Anglo‐American racism and the dispossession of landed Mexican gentry in California, The Squatter and the Don (1885). The leading Latino voice at the end of the century was that of the Cuban writer, journalist, and political agitator José Martí, a towering presence who wrote in both English and Spanish.
In the final chapter of this volume, a sweeping survey of the emergence of American drama, Cheryl Black illustrates how clearly that genre mirrored the manifold social and cultural changes during the period 1820–1914. As novelists began to explore the colonial past, so did dramatists in plays like John Augustus Stone’s Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags (1829). Native American and frontier types populated numerous plays, including Louisa Medina’s ever‐popular Nick of the Woods (1838), while the city was the setting for a host of dramas such as Benjamin Baker’s A Glance at New York (1848). For decades following its first performance in 1852, George Aiken’s adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin remained the most successful American play, while romantic reconciliation melodramas featuring the union of former enemies were also popular following the Civil War. Other plays reflected radical changes in American society, as drama, like poetry and fiction, took a turn toward realism. At the same time, immigrant communities created their own dramas in native languages, while the Irish‐American playwright and performer George M. Cohan helped develop the most distinctive new theatrical genre, the American musical, during the decade before the outbreak of World War I.
By then, drama and American literature more generally had gained a secure footing at home and abroad; certainly, it had come a long way from 1820, when few could have replied with any confidence to Sydney’s Smith’s taunting question “who reads an American book?” Even as it traces the formation and transformation of literature in the United States, this volume reveals many of the changes American literary scholarship has undergone during the last few decades. A major and still fairly recent development is the growing recognition of the crucial role of print culture, especially the proliferation of periodicals, which at once created a vital marketplace for American authors and influenced the kinds of writings they produced. Another change has been the attention accorded to popular literature and previously marginalized genres, from drama and travel writing to a wide range of polemical and reformist works, both before and after the Civil War. That has called attention to the vital tradition of slave narratives, as well as works by Native American activists such as William Apess. Our access to nineteenth‐century periodicals and an ever‐expanding range of pamphlets and popular books has been dramatically expanded by the Internet and digital resources, which have played a vital role in the ongoing effort to recover writings by women. Certainly, that effort has reshaped our understanding of antebellum literature, previously viewed as the province of a few “classic” writers, all of them white men. Where critics once moved swiftly from Cooper’s historical romances to The Scarlet Letter, they now attend to the works of Lydia Maria Child and Catharine Maria Sedgwick; when we now study Transcendentalism, we explore the works of Fuller and other women, as well as those by Emerson and Thoreau; we recognize that Hawthorne and Melville were far outsold by women novelists whose work richly rewards study; and that, while Dickinson is still often paired with Whitman, her innovative verse is now also studied in relation to that of other nineteenth‐century women poets. Our understanding of postbellum literature has been enriched by new approaches and ways of reading, including disability studies; and by an expansion of the canon that has gone hand in hand with a broad revision of our views of writers whose importance has long been recognized, including Twain and James. Finally, we have come to recognize and value the ways in which the country’s literature began to mirror the full diversity of society and culture in the United States, with the appearance of writings by immigrants and African Americans, Native Americans, and Latina/os, including works published or performed in languages other than English. Indeed, by 1914 the challenging question was no longer “who reads an American book?” but rather “what constitutes an American book, or indeed an American?”
References