Old Style: Unoriginality and Its Uses in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature by Claudia Stokes, and: Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women's Poetry by Jennifer Putzi

Abstract

Reviewed by: Old Style: Unoriginality and Its Uses in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature by Claudia Stokes, and: Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women's Poetry by Jennifer Putzi Madeline Zehnder Stokes, Claudia. 2021. Old Style: Unoriginality and Its Uses in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. $79.95 hc. 288 pp. Putzi, Jennifer. 2021. Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women's Poetry. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. $69.95 hc. 320 pp. In a 2016 profile of the poet Eileen Myles, journalist Emily Witt coined the "Theory of the Bad Copy"—a distillation of Myles's belief that copying can be a vehicle for artistic and social change. According to Myles, who has suggested that Black Sparrow Press published them "as a bad copy of Charles Bukowski," people often break with the past by presenting as imitations of established figures (Witt 2016).1 Copying may ease difference, but it also allows new artists to slip through the door and shake things up. The Theory of the Bad Copy suggests that as much as contemporary Western society professes to value originality, it more readily cleaves to the familiar. Latent in the concept of a "bad" copy is the critique that failures of imagination cloud audience ability to recognize what is new or original. At the same time, there's something subversive about a copy characterized by its badness. In a culture that outwardly praises innovation while denigrating imitation, the bad [End Page 146] copy disrupts, slyly reframing the act of copying as creative work. Myles themself has described copying as an essential part of their poetic labor: "[copying] is a form of loving the world. … It is a form of chanting and I do it for religious reasons. I mean it's my default position" (Myles 2020). Practices of imitation also offer social and creative resources for the nineteenth-century Americans whom Claudia Stokes and Jennifer Putzi discuss in their respective monographs. Yet while Myles embraces copying as a mode of introspection and individual renewal, these earlier American authors copy and imitate primarily to forge networks and connections—with the past, with the literary establishment, with each other. Challenging the assumption that originality is a timeless artistic value, Stokes and Putzi explicate unoriginality's appeal for particular nineteenth-century American audiences by pairing close readings of texts with attention to material conditions of textual production, circulation, and use. The nexus of the textual and the material has been a generative site for thinking about the role of copying in the nineteenth-century United States. In recent decades, scholarship including Meredith L. McGill's American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting (2003), Lindsay DiCuirci's Colonial Revivals: The Nineteenth-Century Lives of Early American Books (2018), and the Viral Texts Mapping Project (est. 2012) has positioned reprinting as an important heuristic for understanding early American literary culture. Research on nineteenth-century African American literature, including the essays in Early African American Print Culture (2012), has been crucial to recovering the social and political functions of copying, including how practices such as quotation index nineteenth-century Black American authors' orientation toward the collective. While both Stokes and Putzi engage this scholarship to examine how copying organizes material and social practices, their respective studies help connect the study of material texts with questions and methods drawn from aesthetics and poetics. Together, Old Style and Fair Copy invite scholars to take unoriginal texts seriously as literature—and to ask why the unoriginal has become cause for literary dismissal in the first place. In Old Style, Claudia Stokes charts the rise and fall of unoriginality as a "legitimate aesthetic mode" in the nineteenth-century United States (2021, 2). Revisiting a familiar story of the early national period as an era of print expansion, Stokes shows that even as some authors and publishers deployed novelty to compete for attention [End Page 147] in a crowded market, others advocated for treating the borrowed, familiar, and traditional as markers of literary skill and taste. For many early nineteenth-century Americans, Stokes argues, originality was suspect. Being perceived as literary was less about producing iconoclastic newness than showcasing knowledge of literary...