Multicultural "American" Literature during the Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Abstract

Numerous studies have documented the massive social and cultural change in the US during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as new immigrants, New Women, and racial minorities struggled for social justice and equal opportunity. That quest, of course, was waged in the literary as well as the political and economic arenas. The books under review here by Aviva F. Taubenfeld and Susan Mizruchi make important contributions to American (i.e., US) literary history and American studies as they explore how women and minority authors of the period contested and tried to expand the dominant culture's definition of progress and “true Americanism.” “True Americanism” is, of course, one of Theodore Roosevelt's best-known essays. His influence on American and world political history is well established, but he also exerted a significant influence on American literary history. Writing to Francis Parkman in 1889, young Roosevelt confessed that while he enjoyed politics, “literature must be my mistress perforce” (Letters and Speeches 29). That mistress prompted him to generate more than fifty volumes of writing, two of which have been included in the Library of America. Excerpts from “True Americanism” as well as “The Strenuous Life” are now included in The Norton Anthology of American Literature. But what distinguishes Roosevelt from other literary-minded presidents was his passionate and strenuous efforts to shape the American literary canon according to his ideology. For example, in 1891, he urged his close friend Brander Matthews, professor of drama and literature at Columbia University, to write an anthology of American literature that would promote their progressive American ideals; after it was published (1896), he extolled it in a review published in The Bookman.1