Is There a Future for the Heath Anthology in the Neo-Liberal State?

Abstract

Is There a Future for the Heath Anthology in the Neo-Liberal State? Richard S. Pressman (bio) One For many people, the Heath Anthology represents a valuable effort to help us achieve a more truly democratic literature through greater inclusiveness. Its success is attested to by the fact that it remains in the arena of critical debate, that all other anthologies have moved in the same direction, and that it is now in its third edition. This is all to the good as I and many, many others believe. But the gains that can be made through such a progressive anthology in our time are, I also believe, severely limited. As has been widely observed, an anthology, rather than being a mere collection, is a statement of canonical authority, albeit in a given moment of history. However, in a postmodern age, in which we have become so accustomed to imagining the anti-authoritarian, it’s difficult to imagine on what basis an authority could be developed to unite a society not only so multicultural but so fluid in its multicultural identities. A little history: If I ask my students when the major leagues were integrated, they will tell me, inevitably, the late 1940s with Jackie Robinson. Not so. They were integrated shortly after the Civil War—then, with Jim Crow, steadily unintegrated. While that integration was never deep, because of the majors’ low level of development and the relatively few Black athletes available out of slave conditions, it nevertheless existed (“African-Americans In Baseball”). I find a pattern that’s similar in the development of American literary anthologies, a pattern culminating in the Heath Anthology of 1990. It’s true that Blacks hardly appear at all until the immediate post-World War II period, and then only in terms of folk material, in only one or two anthologies. But all the way back to the nineteenth century, women [End Page 57] appeared, and in numbers larger than many of us saw in our undergraduate anthologies. Yet, all the way back in 1889, an extraordinary ten-volume anthology (hardly intended for classroom use!), titled A Library of American Literature (Stedman and Hutchinson) was co-edited by a man and a woman—though in this century a woman would not be an anthology editor until 1985, nearly a hundred years later. The earliest years covered in the 1889 anthology had a proportion of twenty men to each woman, but even early-on, then, women were represented. The latest years, the post-Civil War period, saw that increase to an extraordinary near-thirty percent. So the proportion of representation may be rather near the proportionate rate of publication. And most of the women authors rediscovered and republished in the last generation appeared back then. Even a few Jews, writing before Abraham Cahan in the 1890s, appeared. In the time of the modern two-volume teaching anthology, beginning in the post-World War II period, we see various experiments attempted, including giving an international perspective through the use of foreigners (mainly British) to comment on American life, and through the translation of reports of the early French and Spanish explorers, on the grounds that they provided the roots for that identity, one we now call multicultural. Albeit in small numbers, Blacks and women were represented, and were not relegated to the category of regional or local-color writers, a common deprecatory device. But in the fifties, most assuredly under the pressures of McCarthyism and the Cold War, these concessions to the non-dominant disappeared—in the name of offering the reader literature only of “high literary merit”—offerings determined, of course, by White Anglo-Saxon Males. This concept, which would remain the major criterion pronounced by nearly every anthology until the first Heath in 1990, had the effect of eliminating nearly every minority voice that had had at least some hearing before. The editors argued that more attention needed to be paid to the so-called major writers—none of whom was a woman (except, in most cases, Emily Dickinson) or a Black or a Native American. Such other groups, while well-represented in the socio-economy, did not exist in the anthology...