American Literature Anthologies Research Articles

TheKalevalaand the Literary Archetype of the Hardworking Finnish American

AbstractIn recent decades, Finnish American literature has begun to receive more critical attention. The use of Finnish American identity symbols in this literature has also begun to be explored, although the number of studies remains relatively low and these studies tend to focus on the work of select authors and their use of food, language, or depictions of the natural world. Additionally, the roots and development of these identity symbols have yet to be investigated. In this article, I examine hard work, or a valuing of work, as a key Finnish American identity symbol. This article represents the first extended analysis of this symbol in Finnish American literature and also the first attempt to tie a Finnish American literary symbol to the Kalevala. Employing deductive thematic analysis of the Kalevala and two Finnish American literature anthologies, and with regard to existing sociological research on Finnish American identity symbols, this article identifies the literary archetype of the hardworking Finnish American and examines its relationship to the national epic of Finland.

Chinese Anthologies of American Literature, Multiculturalism, and Cultural Import-Export

Chinese Anthologies of American Literature, Multiculturalism, and Cultural Import-Export Qin Dan (bio), Joe Lockard (bio), and Shih Penglu (bio) Discussions of the anthology genre need to emphasize the genre's scale of importance. Understanding the centrality of the anthology genre as a foreign language and cultural teaching vehicle can illuminate that importance. For many non-native readers encountering English or American literatures, the anthology is either the basic or an exclusive means of access, using selected short texts or excerpts rather than complete novels, dramas, or non-fiction prose volumes. For these readers, a literature anthology replaces the variety of texts that native English speakers would ordinarily employ in their studies. The anthology genre mediates foreign-ness to readers for whom English-language narrative is alien. The importance of anthologies grows as the likelihood of classroom exposure to a wider range of literature diminishes. Theoretical discussions have addressed American literature anthologies as artifacts of nationalism, racial exclusion, gender discrimination, and their interrelationships (Lockard and Sandell 2008). These editorial ideologies emerged in the context of the use of anthologies by Americans attempting to define, assemble and explicate their own literary traditions. Yet today "to discuss the 'American-ness' of American literature is to discuss minority discourse of the United States" (Lockard and Sandell 2008, 230). Contemporary American literature anthologies have paid particular attention to cultural groups that have been denied citizenship or equal rights, have been economically or socially marginalized, or have been suppressed by means of law. These anthologies range from the first African American literature anthology, The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922) edited by James Weldon Johnson, to Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's foundational Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The English Tradition (1985), to early compendia of gay literature such as Winston Leyland's Angels of the Lyre: A Gay Poetry Anthology (1975). U.S. literature anthologies are not only for domestic readers: they are created, published, read, heavily used, and exert influence far beyond the [End Page 277] borders of the United States. What is the relationship between U.S.-published American literature anthologies and those published elsewhere in the world? Is this a heavily dependent relationship, copying prevailing organization and selections of standard American literature anthologies, or is it a more autonomous relationship that adapts, explicates, and shines a different ideological light over the landscape of American literatures? As with so much U.S. culture, have American literature anthologies become a product that replicates American cultural self-positioning and values? Might there be a reflexive reception through which these anthologies are re-invented to mediate both Chinese and U.S. cultures? Anthologies are the primary and often exclusive vehicle for American literature studies in China. Virtually all these anthologies are edited and published domestically, and few if any U.S.-published anthologies are employed in university classrooms. There are two classes of American literature anthologies—a) "indigenous" anthologies published locally, and b) anthologies from trade publishers or UPes. Anthologization practices in China are complicated by use of the term "English" to cover both English and American literatures and by creation of mixed American-English anthologies. Frequently a mixed anthology contains near-entirely American literature, or even in the case of Hong Zengliu's American Fiction: The Canons of British and American Literature (2003), contains only American literature despite the appearance of "British" in the title. We shall discuss this second class in terms of both entirely American literature anthologies and mixed American-English anthologies. The frequent collapse of a distinction between "American" and "British" literature indicates a destabilization of these national categories in "English" anthologies published in China. After reviewing the modern history of Chinese anthologies of American literature and their editorial ideologies, we will discuss selected examples as they relate to multiculturalism. We will conclude with a theorization of the uses of U.S.-style multiculturalism in Chinese-produced anthologies of American literature. The argument that will emerge, broadly phrased, is that Chinese anthologies of American literature tell us as much or more about China as they do about the United States or American literature. The present study locates itself within the context of Chinese-U.S. comparative studies, especially as they...

Susanna Rowson: Sentimental Prophet of Early American Literature by Steven Epley

Reviewed by: Susanna Rowson: Sentimental Prophet of Early American Literature by Steven Epley Elizabeth Fenton (bio) Susanna Rowson: Sentimental Prophet of Early American Literature Steven Epley Northwestern University Press, 2016. 240 pp. $99.95 cloth. $34.95 paperback. It has become somewhat common in recent years to speak of a religious turn in the study of American literature. A wide range of scholarly work produced in the past two decades reveals a revitalized interest in the complex relationships between the (ever-shifting) categories of religion and literature. At the same time, reassessments of the very methods and reading practices underpinning literary study have called into question the field's own claims to secularity. Steven Epley's Susanna Rowson: Sentimental Prophet of Early American Literature draws on this line of critical thinking and extends its reach through a meticulous assessment of Susanna Rowson's fictional oeuvre. As Epley rightly notes, Rowson is one of the most important literary figures of the early republic. She remains known primarily for her novel Charlotte Temple, an acclaimed best-seller in its own time—appearing in forty-two editions between 1791 and 1812—and an ubiquitous presence in American literature anthologies and syllabuses today. Rowson's lasting influence on American sentimentalism and her engagement with the charged gender politics of her time have been topics of interest to critics for many years. Far less attention, however, has been paid to the religious aspects of her writing. In taking Rowson seriously as a religious writer, Epley's book fills a critical gap in the study of her work [End Page 149] and initiates what I suspect will be ongoing conversations about Rowson's work in particular and the role of religion in fictions produced during this tumultuous period in US history more broadly. This book thus stands as an important contribution to the field, not only for its own specific argument, but also because it offers a model of engagement with religious issues in texts typically deemed secular. In examining Rowson's body of work, Epley draws a rather startling conclusion about her religious perspective. Though she was a lifelong Anglican and a preeminent writer of what might be termed Christian fiction, Rowson, Epley argues, "ironically owes more to the Hebrew Bible than to Christianity, particularly the latter's trope of spiritual conversion" (3). Sentimental Prophet thus provocatively suggests that "the widespread introduction of Jewish values into American culture, traditionally associated with largescale Jewish immigration between roughly 1880 and 1940, actually begins in the early republic" (3). Decentering the notions of spiritual conversion and Christian piety that so often undergird studies of religion in this context, Epley asserts that Rowson's clearest religious influence in her fictions is the Hebrew Bible. Her writing, he contends, "shows abundant evidence of a preternaturally strong dependence on Deuteronomistic covenant theology and a concomitant lack of attention to central Christian themes" (6). This line of analysis uncovers a previously unexamined religious genealogy for Rowson's work, and, in so doing, it opens the door for rethinking both the religious commitments at play in the period's other literary productions and, potentially, the vast body of sentimental writing that followed Rowson's lead in the century that followed. Sentimental Prophet is organized in chapters addressing each of Rowson's major works: her sweeping biblical paraphrase, Biblical Dialogues; Charlotte Temple; her lone historical novel, Reuben and Rachel; and Charlotte Temple's sequel, Lucy Temple. Each chapter situates its specific text in relation to a prophetic or narrative figure in the Hebrew Bible—Moses, Huldah, Hosea, Ruth, and Isaiah—to show how Rowson, "no doubt unconsciously, organized her major works along the arc of Hebrew scriptural history" (5). This is a compelling frame through which to view these texts, but the fact that there are two chapters about Charlotte Temple (taking Huldah and Hosea as their models) makes the book feel a bit unbalanced. Charlotte Temple already has received much more attention from critics than anything else in Rowson's body of work, and the framework Epley builds in this book is so compelling, that I would have preferred a chapter on a different, lesser-read work. Epley's analysis of Charlotte Temple...

Bennett’s Archive I: Lydia Sigourney

Bennett’s Archive I: Lydia Sigourney Elizabeth Petrino Nineteenth-century American women’s poetry has recently come of age. With the arrival of new anthologies and critical volumes, critics have built on Paula Bennett’s pioneering archival work.1 In fact, her landmark Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets: An Anthology (1998) both predates the newly-reconstructed standard American literature anthologies and underscores the aesthetic achievement of many once popular writers, among them a key nineteenth-century woman poet: Lydia Sigourney. Responding to the views of early critics, such as Fred Lewis Pattee in The Feminine Fifties (1940), who disparaged women writers as hack sentimentalists, Bennett’s scholarship also establishes a new way of reading their poetry that emphasizes their legacy within a broad cultural framework. This essay will explore the many ways that Bennett’s anthology and her monograph Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women’s Poetry, 1800–1900 (2003) advanced the critical conversation. Based on her extensive archival research, Bennett’s essays on Sigourney’s poetic achievement and generic experimentation have inaugurated a full reassessment of her influence. [End Page 234] Countering an earlier essay by Yopie Prins and Virginia Jackson, Bennett’s 2007 article, “Was Sigourney a Poetess? The Aesthetics of Victorian Plenitude in Lydia Sigourney’s Poetry,” takes issue with the newly recovered term Poetess and asks whether it should be applied so widely to American women’s poetry.2 Prins and Jackson’s “Lyrical Studies” responded to various projects recuperating and interpreting transatlantic Victorian women writers, Bennett’s among them.3 They claim that the Poetess occupied a role constructed around well-understood aesthetic conventions. By resurrecting the term, Prins and Jackson seek to dislodge the feminist orthodoxy that the lyrical self embodied in the speaking subject or “I” might be read wholly as the poet’s personal self. Rather, they question the degree to which female authors might be able to identify with the emotion traditionally expressed by speakers within the lyric and argue that the Poetess instead comprises “not a speaker, not an ‘I,’ not a consciousness, not a subjectivity, not a voice, not a persona, not a self.” Unlike Bennett, Prins and Jackson define the theory of women’s writing as “lyrical,” rather than focusing on the “lyric” genre, in order to question the limits to which the Poetess must subscribe but which also doom her to obscurity.4 They claim that British women poets, such as Christina Rossetti, L. E. L., Caroline Norton, George Eliot, Michael Field, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning invoke Sappho, both as harbinger of a female literary tradition rooted in a classical past and as a figure of disappointed love and spendthrift emotion. In doing so, British women poets initiated a Poetess tradition of what Bennett terms “succinctly, self-enclosed poems aestheticizing woman’s pain” that proved both highly popular among readers and effective at reducing the poets themselves to empty ciphers.5 In contrast, Bennett claims that American female poets not only resisted the term Poetess, but that they wrote other types of socially relevant poems.6 In America, editors and publishers, rather than aesthetes and literary historians, [End Page 235] shaped publication history by responding to the literary market, thus creating a more competitive environment for poetry than existed in Britain. Perhaps women in America wrote Poetess poetry, Bennett insists, but so did American men, and their poetic production far exceeded this one type.7 Indeed, while in Britain female poets referred to themselves more often as poetesses, in America, female poets eschewed this term—as they largely also eschewed the Sappho figure—in favor of viewing themselves as working professionals without pretensions to literary aestheticism—as Sigourney describes herself, “a schoolmistress and a literary woman.”8 Unlike in Britain, where women poets responded to aesthetic views, in America the reigning model emphasized literary production and the marketplace forces that made poets, among them Sigourney, household names.9 Given Sigourney’s widespread notoriety and public renown, for instance, the publisher of Godey’s Lady’s Book paid the poet $500 per year simply to list her name on the masthead, capitalizing on her reputation.10 And if male editors and critics in...

So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and How It Endures by Maureen Corrigan

Reviewed by: So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and How It Endures by Maureen Corrigan Guy Szuberla Maureen Corrigan, So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and How It Endures. New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2014. 343pp. $26.00. Maureen Corrigan’s So We Read On moves forward with the spirit and energy of a triumphal march. Corrigan is, after all, telling the story of how Minnesotan F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby rose from a near death to become “our Great American Novel,” and how, in her view, it endures as one of the “modernist masterworks,” a work to be set alongside Ulysses and The Wasteland (23, 176). Along the way, Corrigan reconstructs in detail the moments when The Great Gatsby almost ceased to be. Gatsby was published to critical applause in 1925, but sales were disappointing and Scribners wound up warehousing the second printing. When Fitzgerald died on December 21, 1940, the novel was out of print and sales and royalties had dwindled to nothing. Writers of Fitzgerald’s obituaries who bothered to mention Gatsby generally dismissed it as a frivolous relic of the Jazz Age. In May 1940, six months before his death, Fitzgerald had pleaded with his editor Max Perkins to consider bringing back Gatsby as a “25 cent” pocketbook. He worried that when his daughter “Scottie assures her friends I was an author” she’ll learn “no book is procurable” (214). If only to set the stage for the story of Gatsby’s dramatic return as The Great American Novel, Corrigan reconstructs Fitzgerald’s personal failures—his years of alcoholism and writer’s blocks—and keys them to the crucial dates and dead ends in the book’s publication history. She draws upon the usual and expected resources of Fitzgerald scholarship, but she also explores some untraveled routes in reading and re-reading the novel. She has, it’s evident, steeped herself in Fitzgerald biographies and autobiographical material (Scott’s, Zelda’s, and their daughter Scottie’s), attended to minute details of the novel’s composition history, reception, and sales figures, and, when it suits her, has drawn lessons from the cheesiest pieces of popular culture and the most sacred academic rituals of canon formation. [End Page 84] She takes “the Great Gatsby Boat Tour” through Long Island Sound, which, even with its costumed passengers and ersatz feel, fills out a map of Gatsby’s New York. The chapter titled “Rhapsody in Noir” reveals, in surprising and persuasive illustrations, the connections between Gatsby and the hardboiled school of fiction headed by Dashiell Hammett and the 1920s “gals-guts-and-guns” pulpsters. Her commentary on Alan Ladd’s forgotten1949 Gatsby—afilm noir with a tough machine gun toting Gatsby—throws an interesting light on Jay Gatz’s midwestern origins and his relation to his dissolute mentor, Dan Cody. Looking for the early signs of the book’s revival in the 1940s and 1950s, Corrigan notes, as other scholars have, that the critic Edmund Wilson, the writer Dorothy Parker, and other friends edited and collected Fitzgerald’s work in the years just after his death. Their concerted and individual efforts set in motion a Fitzgerald revival. And, mirabile dictu, she finds the beginnings of a new life in the Armed Services Edition of The Great Gatsby—one of many books printed in paperback and distributed free to American troops toward the end of World War II. She discovers still other indications of the novel’s rebirth deep in the stacks of the Library of Congress. Poring over discontinued American Literature anthologies, handbooks, and literary histories, she concludes that in these textbook worlds of the 1940s neither the novel nor Fitzgerald had an existence. Not until 1955 does she find the first excerpt from Gatsby making an appearance in a college anthology. Fitzgerald’s masterpiece was then on its way to becoming “required reading” in high schools and college literature courses (227). In her introduction, Corrigan declares that she wrote So We Read On “above all, [as] a personal excursion into the novel I love more than any other” (15). In her final chapter, “I Didn’t...

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Unique Literary and Writing Style

The importance of including Fitzgerald in American Literature anthologies cannot be overestimated. He believed that he was an original. Fitzgerald's style is completely his own and perhaps the most incomparable aspect of his prose. It is neither so subtly different that it takes perfect pitch to identify nor so eccentric as to be self-consciously sui generis as some other modernist writers. He frequently exploited and became famous for his material rather than because of his technical innovations. The central thematic concerns of Fitzgerald were those of his time and of his country. As writers' material—the subjects, experiences, ideas that they examine and re-examine—is what makes them the kinds of authors they are, this paper tries to investigate more intensely on the influence of three important literary movements: Realism, Modernism and Existentialism on Fitzgerald’s creative works, his material, subjects and themes and techniques and style based on his creative novels.

The Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, Volume One: 17th through 19th Centuries , and: The Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, Volume Two: The 20th Century (review)

Reviewed by: The Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, Volume One: 17th through 19th Centuries, and: The Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, Volume Two: The 20th Century April Lidinsky (bio) The Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, Volume One: 17th through 19th Centuries edited by Lisa Maria Hogeland and Mary Klages. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Press, 2004, 1384 pp., $45.00 paper. The Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, Volume Two: The 20th Century edited by Lisa Maria Hogeland and Shay Brawn. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Press, 2008, 1456 pp., $45.00 paper. While readers will surely gain upper-body strength from toting the splendid two-volume Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, their size also makes an argument: “Look how much we have been missing!” Academics sometimes assume that the white, male American literature canon has been corrected; after all, haven’t we been reading and writing about alternative voices for decades now? But students still commonly emerge from even good high schools nearly untouched by American women writers beyond Harper Lee, a small dose of Emily Dickinson, and perhaps a novel by Zora Neale Hurston or Toni Morrison. The students entering our college literature classrooms may know only the narrowest range of American women’s literary voices. Further, gender and women’s studies departmental survey courses, often still canon-heavy, hardly leave room for lesser-known texts to add more than a dash of diversity to the feast of American literature. How many new voices are enough? And, O weighty judgment: Which voices? Who could envy the task before general editors Lisa Maria Hogeland, Mary Klages, and Shay Brawn, who, along with their coeditors, set out to offer a fresh perspective on the varied landscape of American literature? The prefaces of the two volumes—Volume One: 17th through 19th Centuries and Volume Two: The 20th Century—offer conversation-sparking reflections about “how fraught” the categories of “ ‘American’ and ‘Literature’ truly are” (Hogeland and Klages 2004, xxix). The editors explicitly build on feminist scholarship that works to “make these forgotten texts breathe again, knowing that their vitality will fundamentally alter the ways we think about American literature, American history, and the cultural constructions of identity, such as gender” (xxiii). With the cultural work of literature cast this way, they also remind us that the skeptical question beneath proposed revisions to the Grand Old Canon—“Is it any good?”—sidesteps what critic Jane Tompkins argues are more significant questions: “ ‘Good for whom?’ ‘When?’ and ‘Why?’ ” (1985, 2), and, I would add, [End Page 130] “According to whose opinion? In relation to what agenda?” The editors invite students to consider these big questions as they usefully lay bare their decision to select texts that “represent ways that women’s voices enter into public discourse” (xxiv), noting that they privilege “certain themes and topics that have been underrepresented” in other anthologies, such as sexualities, disabilities, and the rights of native peoples and people of color. For instructors, the texts have been selected “with an eye toward ways they might work together in provocative and teachable constellations” (xxviii), and the editors offer a range of topics and issues that would allow students to dwell in a specific historical moment or to make connections over centuries. In sum, this is a text for teachers, made transparently inviting for students. Volume One differs from most American literature anthologies, in which readers’ fingers trail far down a table of contents of male writers before happening upon some Anne Bradstreet poems. The Aunt Lute collection includes generous selections by Bradstreet, but opens with “The Examination of Mrs. Anne Hutchinson at the Court at Newtown,” an explosive record of the 1637 heresy trial. This fiery text makes evident that Hutchinson’s gender is on trial as well as her theology (“not tolerable nor comely in the sight of God nor fitting for your sex” [1]), and launches this volume with apocalyptic energy. The editors include excerpts from Salem trials and a thick slice of Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, along with lesser-known texts such as “The Life of Mary Read” and “The Life of...

Asian American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Anthology (review)

Reviewed by: Asian American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Anthology Rachel N. Simons Shawn Wong, ed., Asian American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Anthology New York: Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers Inc., 1996, xviii + 462 pp. Nearly 15 years after its initial publication, Asian American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Anthology is still in its first edition. Despite its age, this anthology remains one of the top selections for university courses within the field of Asian American Literature studies and education. This position, while partly achieved due to a lack of extensive options, is nonetheless well-deserved. Containing a foreword by Ishmael Reed (General Editor of the Longman Literary Mosaic Series), as well as a preface and an introduction by Shawn Wong, the anthology rests on a solid foundation of Asian American literature and possesses some unique features which will be valuable to any focused study of the field. One such feature is the personal touch of the preface and introduction. Shawn Wong, a distinguished Asian American author in his own right, has the distinction of previously creating one of the first serious Asian American literature anthologies (Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers, first published in 1974) and therefore brings a special perspective to his role as editor. His very personal preface contrasts with the more formal introduction and may give the book a greater sense of "relevance" for students and make the historical context of the anthology more engaging. Interestingly, Wong chooses to eschew excerpts from novels and longer works and includes only complete texts. Wong suggests that the anthology "is meant to be supplemented" with other texts, such as complete novels, as there are now "dozens and dozens of works by Asian Americans in print" to select from (xvii). Because Asian American novels are becoming increasingly common and are more familiar to today's students, the choice to use complete novels is probably even easier now than in 1996. Today, there are more than "dozens and dozens" of complete texts to choose from, yet there is still a distinct lack of contemporary, unified anthologies (xvii). However, Wong also includes a list of recommendations of other works at the end of the book, which may prove both beneficial for instructors and inspirational to students. In comparison with Wong's preface, the introduction does not hold up as well. [End Page 264] The introduction serves as a broad historical background, but is probably better supplemented by outside texts and specific lectures. Much of the "contemporary" culture and historical commentary is now somewhat out of date. Much of the introduction is an abbreviated historical timeline which highlights a few specific (though notable) examples of early Asian American writers. However, Wong does not include in his discussion many ethnic/cultural groups which have recently risen to prominence in the media's eye, such as Indian Americans, Vietnamese Americans, and Korean Americans. The historical discussion also includes only events through the mid-seventies, which may seem distant to many students expecting to see a contemporary name that they recognize. The overall selection of the anthology follows the tone of the introduction. Wong includes solid, noteworthy examples of historical representation, but the collection is sorely lacking in representatives from the last 15 to 20 years and from the above-mentioned cultural groups. The anthology is divided into four sections: "Autobiography, Memoir, and Nonfiction Essay," "Fiction," "Poetry," and "Drama." This organization by format rather than by theme or background also distinguishes this book from several other anthologies, though Wong does include a "thematic" table of contents at the end of the book. The selections for the first section are particularly well-suited for introducing novice students to the common issues discussed among authors and scholars within the field. Amy Tan's essay "Mother Tongue," an examination of the different types of "English" that she must use and acknowledge as a Chinese American writer, may particularly resonate with contemporary students who are accustomed to hearing the fine nuances of the different forms of English spoken in America. Students may also appreciate the approachability and the "readability" of the essay, which Tan herself describes. Traise Yamato's "Different Silences" is a good, brief exploration into the issues...

National Narratives and the Politics of Inclusion: Historicizing American Literature Anthologies

This essay discusses the history of American literature anthologies from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth century; examines their racial and gender inclusions and exclusions; and argues that literary anthologies have played an important role in the production of the American, and more recently multicultural, national narrative.

Taking Anthologies Seriously

Among Katharine Newman's virtues was that she took anthologies seriously, one of the earliest critics to do so. (1) Anyone who understands how educational institutions really function--like Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, they of Understanding Poetry, Understanding Fiction, and with R.W.B. Lewis, American Literature--The Makers and the Making, among many other significant textbooks--knows well how powerful such books are. But the usual academic judgment, one I shared for many years, was that expressed by e.e. cummings' poetic joke at the expense of Louis Untermeyer: mr u will not be missed who as an anthologist sold the many on the few not excluding mr u (1 X 1, #XI) The usual rap against anthologies was that they were superficial, offering a hop, skip, and jump through literary history instead of providing in-depth views of truly great works. There were too many authors, it was said, even in the most limited texts, those included were too uneven in quality, and the multitude of options distracted students from focusing on the true aesthetic value of literary texts. It was, therefore, the argument ran, best to teach whole works of value rather than offering the kind of smorgasbord of brief texts characteristic of even the best anthologies. What Katharine Newman recognized, and what many of us have come to see, is that this argument was, in practice, a first line of defense against letting most ethnic writers in the classroom door. It was a self-reinforcing argument: that they were not in the standard anthologies argued that they were not valuable; because they were not valued, they were not in the anthologies and thus not taught. Anthologies could, she saw, enable the work of opening the canon and our students' understanding of writing, publishing, and culture more generally. That has indeed been the case, as one can quickly see by comparing tables of contents of American literature anthologies even unto the 1990s with those dominating the market today. In this chapter I want to discuss two aspects of taking anthologies seriously: some of the ways in which they are uniquely useful, and some of the ways in which, like all books and people, they become hard to change. If in teaching literature one emphasizes primarily literary monuments, the putatively great books of the great--that is, canonical writers, context and history, much less biography or analysis of movements and cultural formations, become less significant than internal and intertextual linguistic and aesthetic concerns. But what if one wishes, rather, to help students come to see literature as one form, however special, of textual production in any historical moment? What if one wishes to emphasize the differences and similarities among texts in any particular period? Or to observe the processes of change that help to answer the question why this thing in this way at this time? To observe change, to account for difference and similarity, to comprehend the historical conditions of textual production--all, it seems to me, lead us toward the comprehensive anthology, rather than to separate books by individual authors. To see why, it is useful to turn to my first subject, teaching with anthologies. I want to emphasize a number of considerations: * The importance of literary and cultural history, that is, viewing texts and authors in relationship with one another, in time and over time. * The usefulness of seeing texts within the historical and social contexts in which they were first produced, distributed, and consumed. * The desirability of examining the conditions of textual production at different moments, including our own. * The need for widening the lens to include a richer selection of genres. These are overlapping categories, but I want to try sorting them out because they suggest somewhat differing features of what teaching with anthologies today can provide. …

Six Hymns by Samson Occom

Six Hymns by Samson Occom Joanna Brooks (bio) Samson Occom (1723–1792) was a Mohegan tribal leader, an ordained Presbyterian minister, a major fund-raiser for what is now Dartmouth College, the leader of an intertribal revitalization and resettlement movement, and the first published Native American author. His Sermon at the Execution of Moses Paul (1772), the first English-language text written and published by a Native American author, appeared in more than a dozen editions and reprintings—including a Welsh-language translation —before 1820. This sermon and a short autobiographical narrative drafted by Occomin 1768 have been inducted into American literature anthologies and reintroduced to contemporary scholars of early American and Native American literatures. Yet it is not widely known that Occom also wrote and published in poetic forms and that he maintained a lifelong interest in hymnody. In 1774, he compiled, edited, and published the groundbreaking and widely popular A Choice Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs; Intended for the Edification of Sincere Christians, of All Denominations; he also wrote at least six hymn-texts published in his Collection and elsewhere. On the merits of the Collection, leading musicologist Robert Stevenson has declared Occom "the first Native American published composer" ("First Composer").More than that, Occom was a leader in the movement to develop an indigenous American hymn tradition. Occom's original hymn-texts also distinguish him as the first Native American to publish poetry in English, and they establish the historical beginnings of Native English-language poetry in the eighteenth century. Occom's interest in hymnody arose from the intersection of Christian and Indian traditions in a context of social, cultural, and religious change. Song had long been an important element of community life and ritual among Occom's Mohegan and other southern New England tribes. During the eighteenth century, the continuity of tribal song traditions and tribal communities themselves came under tremendous threat. War, colonist population growth, poverty, land disputes, missionary colonialism, [End Page 67] disruption of traditional aqua- and agriculture, and other factors caused population reduction and community relocation among the tribes. Many young Indian men and women were indentured as household servants, laborers, and sailors; others were placed by well-meaning parents in boarding schools such as Wheelock's Moor's Indian Charity School (see Silverman). In all of these situations, removal from family, clan, and tribe meant reduced exposure to traditional languages, songs, and stories. The eighteenth century also brought great changes to American religious music, especially in New England where the Bay Psalm Book had long dominated congregational song. The advent of English hymnody and the introduction of works by Isaac Watts in the 1710s and 1720s challenged the dominance of psalmody and attracted adherents among New England clergy and elites. Cotton Mather admired Watts but nonetheless rejected his hymns for use in church worship; his nephew Mather Byles and other young New England poets emulated Watts as they did Alexander Pope. The 1720s also saw the rise of the regular singing movement, which advocated that the old practice of "lining out" psalms be abandoned for printed tunebooks. Thomas Walter, another nephew to Cotton Mather, helped lead the movement with his Grounds and Rules of Music Explained (1721) (see Beuchner). Colonial singing schools soon followed, as venues for instruction in new vocal techniques like fuguing and for the innovation of new tunes. The publication of American tunebooks such as James Lyon's Urania, or a Choice Collection of Psalm Tunes, Anthems, or Hymns (1762), Josiah Flagg's A Collection of the Best Psalm Tunes (1764), and William Billings's The New England Psalm Singer (1770) established this newly extensive tune repertoire. New Light partisans of the Great Awakening and later revivals disseminated and popularized these new developments in hymnody. More radical revivalists also promoted the use of American-composed hymn-texts, which were often paired with folk tunes. For example, the Separate Congregationalist James Davenport wrote his own hymns and led hymn-singing processions through the streets of New London, Connecticut.1 While Davenport's practices scandalized conservative clergy, they were well received among nearby Indian communities. In his autobiographical narrative, Samson Occom credited Davenport and other "Extraordinary Ministers" with effecting the...

Shaping an African American Literary Canon

Shaping an African American Literary Canon Robert Elliot Fox The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay, general editors. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. Includes an audio companion compact disc with 21 selections. Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition. Patricia Liggins Hill, general editor. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. Includes an audio companion compact disc with 26 selections. The publication of these two massive anthologies—each is over 2,000 pages long—is a milestone in the history of African American Studies and testifies to the significance and strength of the African American tradition of literature. Many of us long have been aware of the Norton anthology project, initiated by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., which was in the works for a decade and was eagerly, even impatiently, awaited by those who recognized the importance of the venture. I first learned of the Riverside project, however, when I received an advertising flier about the book early in 1997. Though there inevitably is a good deal of overlap in terms of authors and works, it would be wrong to see the existence of these two anthologies as a case of redundancy. (Indeed, these are not the only African American literature anthologies currently available, but they are, by a longshot, the most formidable.) Certain ongoing skirmishes notwithstanding, by now there is widespread agreement on the merits of many of the works chosen or proposed for inclusion in the African American literary canon, but there is not the same sort of consensus regarding the inner dynamics of that canon, the logics of its unfolding, its possible unifying principles. We have here two lengthy takes on the very important and surely controversial topic of what we might term the shape (and the shaping forces) of the canon. For those who wish to keep score, the Norton anthology contains the work of 120 writers, of whom 52 are women. The Riverside anthology features over 150 authors, including more than 70 women. There will be (there already have been) complaints about the exclusion or inclusion of particular authors or works, a controversy of tastes, temperaments and allegiances that no anthology or anthology-makers can hope to avoid. (I’ll toss a few cowries of my own into this debate later in this review.) But this is a battleground for critics and partisans. Strictly from a pedagogical perspective, there’s little to detain us, since the two collections are, on the whole, so extremely rich. In any event, time constraints in courses in which these texts are likely to be utilized unavoidably require a good deal of selectivity, and many teachers will want to supplement any sweeping anthology with additional materials of their own choosing, so debates over what’s in and what’s out in the end have more to do with the politics of canon formation than they have to do with the practical business of conducting a course. The Norton anthology is organized rather straightforwardly into seven periods: The Vernacular Tradition; The Literature of Slavery and Freedom: 1746–1865; Literature of the Reconstruction to the New Negro Renaissance: 1865–1919; Harlem Renaissance: 1919–1940; Realism, Naturalism, Modernism: 1940–1960; The Black Arts Movement: 1960–1970; Literature Since 1970. The Riverside anthology is divided into six major periods of “African American History and Culture”: 1619–1808, 1808–1865, 1865–1915, 1915–1945, 1945–1960, 1960 to the Present. In keeping with the volume’s title, the internal organization of each of these divisions reflects the call and response patterns that the editors see as characterizing, not just black performance modes, but the evolution of African American tradition itself. For example, the second period has the heading, “Tell Ole Pharaoh, Let My People Go,” and is structured around a “Southern Folk Call for Resistance” and a “Northern Literary Response: Rights for Blacks, Rights for Women,” while the last section, dealing with literature since 1960, is called “Cross Road Blues,” and is structured around a “Folk Call for Social Revolution and Political Strategy” and a “Call for Critical Debate,” answered by “Voices of the New Black Renaissance, Women’s Voice’s of Self-Definition, Voices...

No Short Journeys: The Interplay of Cultures in the History and Literature of the Borderlands

These thirteen essays comprise a richly patterned 'quilt,' expertly addressing the influence of Mexico and Latin and South America upon the North American imagination...Cecil Robinson's impressive breadth of expertise, his fascinating interpretations, make this collection of essays invaluable regional reading. The bibliography alone is a treasure, gift from a man whose life's work was to form a bridge of humanistic understanding between the two primary cultures of the New World. El Palacio In graceful prose, the longtime English professor leads readers on a leisurely stroll through the literary landscape of the Southwest. Journal of Arizona History Does more for reconstructing American literature than any of the contemporary American literature anthologies that are on the market today...Strongly recommended. Choice

Expanding the Circle: Hispanic Voices in American Literature

of the program-our remarkable collection of literature. Yet only twelve of the 1,399 pages in the text (less than 1%) are devoted to works by writers with Hispanic surnames (the nature writer Barry Holstun Lopez and the Filipino poet Jose Garcia Villa), and not a single page is devoted to literature about Hispanic experience in the United States. The contents of American-literature anthologies offered by Scribner's, Scott Foresman, and other well-known publishers include little more. Literature anthologies are repositories of what is considered essential and classic in our liter-

A MELUS Dialogue: The Status of Women Authors in American Literature Anthologies

Journal Article A MELUS Dialogue: The Status of Women Authors in American Literature Anthologies Get access Judith Fetterley, Judith Fetterley Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Joan Schulz Joan Schulz Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar MELUS, Volume 9, Issue 3, December 1982, Pages 3–17, https://doi.org/10.2307/467280 Published: 01 December 1982