Writers in Retrospect

256 pp., 5.5 x 8.5, 2 illus., notes, index

Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8078-5720-5
Published: October 2006
E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-0-8078-7750-0
Published: October 2007
E-book PDF ISBN: 979-8-8908-8030-7
Published: October 2007

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In the aftermath of America's centennial celebrations of 1876, readers developed an appetite for chronicles of the nation's past. Born amid this national vogue, the field of American literary history was touted as the balm for numerous "ills"--from burgeoning immigration to American anti-intellectualism to demanding university administrators--and enjoyed immense popularity between 1880 and 1910.

In the first major analysis of the field's early decades, Claudia Stokes offers important insights into the practices, beliefs, and values that shaped the emerging discipline and have continued to shape it for the last century. She considers particular personalities--including Thomas Wentworth Higginson, William Dean Howells, Brander Matthews, and Mark Twain--and episodes that had a formative effect on American literary history as a discipline. Reexamining the field's deep attachment to the literature of antebellum New England, the periodization of the nineteenth century, and the omission of Native narratives, Stokes reveals the many forces, both inside and outside the academy, that propelled the rise of American literary history and persist as influences on the work of current practitioners of the field.

About the Author

Claudia Stokes is associate professor of English at Trinity University in San Antonio. She is coeditor of American Literary Studies: A Methodological Reader.
For more information about Claudia Stokes, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

"A valuable addition to our understanding of how American literature was institutionalized as an academic discipline."--Modern Philology

"Fascinating."--New England Quarterly

"Expands our understanding of the historical forces that consolidated and professionalized the study of American Literature during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries."--Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

"[A] much needed map of the networks and context that informed literary histories written during the late nineteenth century."--American Book Review

"Fascinating and well-written. . . . A very valuable work that shows how American literary history has been shaped by realist versus populist debates, issues of copyright and--most importantly--by the professionalism of the academy. . . . Reminds us that literary histories. . . are best examined within the cultural forces that brought them forth."--Resources for American Literary Study

"Stokes's account of Wendell's running battle with his more progressive contemporary, William Dean Howells, and Wendell's successful attempt to create an institutional elite by establishing the history and literature concentration at Harvard put a human face on this analysis of the still-contested territory of national literary history. Recommended."--Choice