“That Grim Sphinx”: Literary Historicism and Tourgée’s Toinette Novels

Abstract

Abstract [W]e need to continue the key conversation in the field about how to revitalize literary historicism. Matthew Arnold and Tourgée can help to contribute to this conversation. This essay puts the Reconstruction novelist Albion Tourgée in dialogue with the English critic Matthew Arnold in an effort to revitalize the role of literary historicism in American literary studies today. Specifically, it offers a case study of Tourgée’s three Toinette novels (1874, 1879, 1881), all relatively neglected, to make the case for the importance of continuing to study nineteenth-century American literature at least in part in a national frame, but one that takes account of the complexities of temporality. One of the functions of American literary criticism at the present time should be the continued recuperation of lost or neglected voices like Tourgée’s. A more pronounced attention to literary historicism, as the writings of both Tourgée and Arnold suggest, does not mean having to reproduce the exceptionalism and blindnesses of the past or present, especially if critics reject a rigid historical contextualism.