The American literature test: National literary history and the cipher of America

The dissertation is a study of the imaginative gestures and tactics in six important histories of American literature. The introduction argues that the intersection of the "impossibilities" of national literary history and of a secure idea of America provides fertile ground for "literary" answers to historical perplexities. In Part One, the question "Does American literature exist?" shapes the discussion of the first histories of American literature, Samuel Lorenzo Knapp's 1829 Lectures on American Literature and Moses Coit Tyler's 1878 History of American Literature 1607-1765. Both texts conjure an "American Literature" out of the writings of British Colonial North America, but from differing complexes of anxiousness and desire. Noteworthy in both is the strategy for making the tradition imaginable through comprehensive but hybrid figures of the American spirit. Part Two explores the American literary historical convention of periodization by war, and the thematic presence of war generally. Its central texts are Barrett Wendell's 1900 Literary History of America and the first Cambridge History of American Literature. In Part Three, the discussion of Parrington's 1927 Main Currents in American Thought tests the inverse-proportion law of "Progressive" history, i.e. the more progressive the approach the more likely the history will read like a tragic epic. The narrative challenge is even greater for a collaborative history such as the 1948 Literary History of the United States of Spiller et al. This history's theory of development (Spiller's spiral) and its mechanics of consensus (altered and relocated chapter introductions and conclusions, and explanatory chapters at points where the text-based narrative breaks down) are examined in light of the history's veiled opposition to Marxist models of development proposed by critics such as V. F. Calverton, Granville Hicks, and Bernard Smith. The conclusion argues for the usefulness of a ritual ground for the dance of questions and possibilities, for the vitality to be found in the celebration of American literature as a fancy with effect.