Introduction: New Critical formalism and identity in Americanist criticism

Abstract

How are experience and literary form related in nineteenth-century American literature? I enter into that question, this book's central concern, through literary nationalists' counterintuitive assertion that America was a singularly uninteresting subject. In the words of one such critic, W. H. Gardiner, “You see cultivated farms, and neat villages, and populous towns, full of health, and labor, and happiness … Where then are the romantic associations, which are to plunge your reader, in spite of reason and common sense, into the depths of imaginary woe and wonder?” From this barrenly cheerful land American literature magically blossomed – in the literary historical narrative envisioned by nineteenth-century nationalists, and adapted by early twentieth-century critics such as Van Wyck Brooks and F. O. Matthiessen. Celebrating American literature's purported creation of a shared national identity has subsequently been dismantled as a falsely universalist construction obscuring the multiplicities and material negotiations of the lives of individuals and groups within the United States. My intention is neither to revive the early twentieth-century celebration of American literature's role in founding a national culture (as in recent works that would rearticulate American national identity through reference to its literary history), nor to extend the critique of it (a critique which now includes analysis of the wider context of the Americas as constitutive of and obscured by the totalizing notion of “America”).