Essaying Antebellum Prose

Abstract

Hard on the heels of volume 1 of Cambridge History of American Literature, which covered early American literature from initial European contact with native peoples through the early Republic, comes this volume, devoted to all forms of prose writing the antebellum period. Those who found the first installment of this long-awaited series a useful, though hardly complementary, collection of monographs should be more pleased with this effort, for herein the general editor assembled four sophisticated contributions that reassess the remarkable literary achievement of the period.' Keeping his introductory comments to a minimum, Bercovitch sets the agenda by reiterating he observed the first volume the series. Briefly put, he argues that, as we approach the millennium, consensus about America's literary history broken down and been replaced by dissensus, with any invocation of the former sounding rather like appeal for compromise, or nostalgia. Further, what used to be a relatively clear division between criticism and scholarship, aesthetic and historical analysis, he observes, has blurred and then subdivided over and over again (in various combinations) into a spectrum of special interests (p. 2). Thus, with American literary history now defined in the plural, each contributor was given free rein to approach relevant texts through whatever points of view seemed to him or her most productive, the whole volume integrated mainly through the ways that each scholar's authority would complement that of the others. Happily for posterity, the intellectual gamble worked well; the book's four sections are a hand difficult to beat for overview of antebellum prose. volume succeeds so well because of the strength of each contribution, for, as Bercovitch had hoped, all four scholars demonstrate themselves full control of general methodologies as well as the range of prose literature germane to them. So do we have here? Michael Davitt Bell contributes a piece on The Conditions of Literary Vocation, essentially overview of the literary marketplace or, as Bercovitch puts it, an inside narrative of literature