Richard Gray - A History of American Literature

This edition first published 2012
2012 Richard Gray

Edition history: Blackwell Publishers Ltd (1e, 2004)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gray, Richard J.
A history of American literature / Richard Gray. 2nd ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4051-9229-3 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-4051-9228-6 (paper)
1. American literatureHistory and criticism. I. Title.
PS88.G73 2011
810.9dc23

2011026044

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDF: 9781444345674; ePub: 9781444345681; Wiley Online Library: 9781444345704; Mobi: 9781444345698

To
Sheona

Acknowledgments

In this history of American literature, I have tried to be responsive to the immense changes that have occurred over the past forty years in the study of American literature. In particular, I have tried to register the plurality of American culture and American writing: the continued inventing of communities, and the sustained imagining of nations, that constitute the literary history of the United States. I have accumulated many debts in the course of working on this book. In particular, I would like to thank friends at the British Academy, including Andrew Hook, Jon Stallworthy, and Wynn Thomas; colleagues and friends at other universities, among them Kasia Boddy, Susan Castillo, Henry Claridge, Richard Ellis, the late Kate Fullbrook, Mick Gidley, Sharon Monteith, Judie Newman, Helen Taylor, and Nahem Yousaf; and colleagues and friends in other parts of Europe and in Asia and the United States, especially Saki Bercovitch, Bob Brinkmeyer, the late George Dekker, Jan Nordby Gretlund, Lothar Honnighausen, Bob Lee, Marjorie Perloff, and Waldemar Zacharasiewicz. Among my colleagues in the Department of Literature, I owe a special debt of thanks to Herbie Butterfield and Owen Robinson; I also owe special thanks to my many doctoral students. Sincere thanks are also due to Emma Bennett, the very best of editors, at Wiley-Blackwell for steering this book to completion, to Theo Savvas for helping so much and so efficiently with the research and preparation, and to Nick Hartley for his informed and invaluable advice on illustrations. Special thanks are also due to Brigitte Lee and Jack Messenger for, once again, proving themselves to be such thoughtful, meticulous, and creative copyeditors, and to my daughter Jessica for (also once again) making such a first-class job of proofreading and the compilation of the index. On a more personal note, I would like to thank my older daughter, Catharine, for her quick wit, warmth, intelligence, and understanding, and for providing me with the very best of son-in-laws, Ricky Baldwin, and two perfect grandsons, Izzy and Sam; my older son, Ben, for his thoughtfulness, courage, commitment, and good company; my younger daughter, Jessica, for her lively intelligence, grace, and kindness, as well as her refusal to take anything I say on trust; and my younger son, Jack, who, being without language, constantly reminds me that there are other, deeper ways of communicating. Finally, as always, I owe the deepest debt of all to my wife, Sheona, for her patience, her good humor, her clarity and tenderness of spirit, and for her love and support, for always being there when I need her. Without her, this book would never have been completed: which is why, quite naturally, it is dedicated to her.

The First Americans

American Literature Before and During the Colonial and Revolutionary Periods

Imagining Eden

America is a poem in our eyes: its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres. The words are those of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and they sum up that desire to turn the New World into words which has seized the imagination of so many Americans. But America was only one of the several names for a dream dreamed in the first instance by Europeans. He invented America: a very great man, one character observes of Christopher Columbus in a Henry James novel; and so, in a sense, he did. Columbus, however, was following a prototype devised long before him and surviving long after him, the idea of a new land outside and beyond history: a Virgin Countrey, to quote one early, English settler, so preserved by Nature out of a desire to show mankinde fallen into the Old Age of Creation, what a brow of fertility and beauty she was adorned with when the world was vigorous and youthfull. For a while, this imaginary America obliterated the history of those who had lived American lives long before the Europeans came. And, as Emersons invocation of America a poem discloses, it also erased much sense of American literature as anything other than the writing into existence of a New Eden.

Not that the first European settlers were unaware of the strangeness of America: in October 1492, for example, Christopher Columbus (14511506) confided to his journals that there were a thousand kinds of herbs and flowers in this New World, of all of which I remain in ignorance as to their properties. His ignorance extended, famously, into areas he was hardly aware of: convinced that he had arrived at the continent of India, he christened the people he encountered Indians. Their language I do not understand, admitted Columbus. And their customs he found either odd or abhorrent. The natives went about with firebrands in their hands, Columbus along with other early European explorers observed, these they call by the name of