Cultures of Criticism in Antebellum America

Cultures of Criticism in Antebellum America argues that the rapid expansion of the institution of literary criticism in the 1830s and 40s was a catalyst for the American renaissance of the 1850s. In the decades leading up to the Civil War, technological innovations ranging from the steam press to railroads to gas lamps combined with social transformations such as expanding literacy and a centralizing print industry to produce what historians have called a cheap print revolution. At the center of this revolution was the figure of the critic, who emerged both as part of the general literary expansion and as a direct response to what many felt to be an increasingly untenable excess of print. By 1840, criticism was a strongly felt cultural force as well as a characteristic aspect of the antebellum zeitgeist, impacting the shape and direction of American literature during a formative period of its development. The critical impulse took many forms, moreover—reviews, essays, anthologies, prefaces, fiction and poetry—and engaged a variety of genres from puff to poetics, science to satire, each with its own set of social applications and literary traditions.;In Chapter One, I explore the most visible of these forms, the book review, and in mid-nineteenth century America, no reviewer was more prolific or notorious than Edgar Allan Poe, nicknamed the "Tomahawk" on account of his reputation for critical severity. Yet Poe also insisted that for American literature to improve, it needed exactly the sort of severe, honest, scientifically rigorous criticism that his own reviews displayed. This position was complicated, however, by his persistent anxiety that while criticism served many necessary functions, it was also in some ways superfluous to the true Romantic aim of poetry, a contradiction expressed most intricately in "The Philosophy of Composition. In Chapter Two, I shift focus from Poe's conflicted anatomizing of the art of criticism to the macroscopic realm of literary history as explored through antebellum America's most prominent editor of literary anthologies, Rufus Griswold. While Poe approached literature through a microscope, Griswold viewed it through a telescope, and in The Poets and Poetry of America (1842) and The Prose Writers of America (1847), he worked to reconcile the grand, nationalist ambitions of Romantic historiography with the practical limitations of a nascent Victorian commodity culture.;In Chapter Three, I turn from the practice of criticism to its impact on the literature of the period. Whether authors responded with vituperation or accommodation, the critical presence shaped the literature of the period in substantive ways, pushing American literature to become more exacting and self-aware at a formative moment of its development. While Herman Melville buckled under the pressure of increasingly negative reviews before finally giving up novel writing completely, George Lippard and Fanny Fern incorporated the figure of the critic into their fictional writings as a subject for satire and scorn. Nathaniel Hawthorne took a different route altogether, devising a comprehensive strategy of critical engagement that entailed cultivating relationships with prominent critics, preempting criticism through his series of prefaces, and incorporating feedback from reviews into subsequent works through a reciprocal author-critic feedback loop. Specifically, Hawthorne solicited advice from the rising critical star Edwin Percy Whipple, incorporated Whipple's suggestions to improve his manuscript, and anticipated the work's critical reception through the novel's preface, effectively enacting a vision of sympathetic, constructive criticism that he later allegorized in his final published novel, The Marble Faun (1860).;In Chapter Four, I shift from the impact of the critical culture upon the period's literature to a consideration of criticism as a material technology for the management and dissemination of knowledge. Book reviews were both a check on print surplus and a powerful tool for the transmission and mediation of new ideas, catalyzing the Transcendentalist movement by introducing inaccessible foreign strains of thought into mainstream intellectual currents. In short, literary criticism must be viewed in the context of the material modes of its circulation, an approach that requires what I term a taxonomy of critical forms. I conclude the dissertation by gesturing ahead with Margaret Fuller's criticism for Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, in which Fuller traded the detached intellectualism of the Dial for a more practical, socially engaged conception of criticism grounded in the utilitarian form of the newspaper book review. In doing so Fuller turned reviews into instruments of not merely self-culture but progressive social reform, signaling the emergence of a more radical, politicized critical counterculture that began to consolidate in the years leading up to the Civil War. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).