American Literary History

Castronovo, Russ; Goyal, Yogita

doi: 10.1093/alh/ajag049pmid: N/A

Dango, Michael

doi: 10.1093/alh/ajag046pmid: N/A

By foregrounding genre as an analytic for a sociology of post-1945 publishing, recent scholars seem to be playing catch-up with the industry; we are coming late to a party in which publishers and content distributors have already named the genres we study. Our scholarly lag allows us to research how capitalism shapes creative production, but it makes it harder for our study to disrupt the categories of creative production that markets have systematized for us. As an alternative, this essay recovers an approach to genre modeled by the midcentury neo-Aristotelian critics associated with the University of Chicago. The Chicago Critics were once the main rival of the New Critics, but it was the latter who won that struggle, and today it is only the latter we typically remember. This is a shame because, I argue, the skill of close reading we associate with the New Critics is logically incoherent without the skill of taxonomy presented by the Chicago Critics and their focus on genre. In particular, they bring out the importance of “hypothetical genres”: categories we have not yet named but are prompted to explore by the logic of the taxonomy we have begun.

Stokes, Claudia

doi: 10.1093/alh/ajag045pmid: N/A

This essay examines the history of moralistic criticism, the oldest and most enduring of all modes of literary criticism. From antiquity to the twentieth century, criticism entailed the evaluation of a text’s moral content, and for literally millennia, critics were charged with protecting vulnerable young readers from potentially harmful literary influence. Moralism finally fell from grace at the hands of the New Critics, who insisted that morality had no role to play in literary criticism. This essay argues that, despite the New Critics, moralism continues to exert considerable influence on literary criticism, both in the academy and in the wider public.

Nishikawa, Kinohi

doi: 10.1093/alh/ajag050pmid: N/A

Once recognized as a standard field of training in literary scholarship, textual criticism has struggled to maintain a footing in the study of modern American literature. Even though its methods remain essential to the production of critical editions, textual criticism’s investment in questions of authorial intention and publication history is discounted, if not outright dismissed, by dominant formalist and theoretical approaches. Against this disciplinary trend, this essay makes a case for the interpretive significance of textual criticism’s empirical methods. In a comparative analysis of published versions of Percival Everett’s 2001 satirical novel Erasure, the essay shows how evidence of textual accidents (typos) and of textual agency (edits) turns the idea of authorial intention into an opportunity for literary interpretation. Where an older textual criticism would have used such evidence to determine the singular authority of a literary work, a “socialized” textual criticism locates interpretive possibility in the gap between what an author means and how that meaning is executed in publication. As a novel about an author whose literary creation escapes his intention, Erasure is a unique vehicle for demonstrating the interpretive potential of textual criticism, even and precisely when its author, Everett, is implicated in its typos and edits.

Kim, Heeyeon

doi: 10.1093/alh/ajag048pmid: N/A

This essay reconsiders Lionel Trilling’s concept of sincerity by situating it within the ethical and political tensions of mid-twentieth-century liberalism. Against narratives that trace a linear movement from postwar seriousness to postmodern irony, it identifies a crucial mid-century moment in which sincerity becomes inseparable from ambivalence, hesitation, and self-doubt. Reading Sincerity and Authenticity (1971) alongside Trilling’s essays on culture and Jewish identity, the essay argues that sincerity is not a stable moral quality but an ongoing negotiation shaped by conditions of belonging and estrangement. In doing so, it revises Trilling’s place within a Jewish assimilationist framework, showing that his work does not simply endorse cultural assimilation but registers a more conflicted and unresolved relation to belonging. Through his engagement with figures such as Isaac Babel, the essay demonstrates how ambivalent sincerity—often dismissed as a form of political weakness—can instead function as a mode of ethical awareness

Greiman, Jennifer

doi: 10.1093/alh/ajag047pmid: N/A

In recent years, scholars across fields have privileged forms of literary realism to propose more affirmative and constructive critical models for describing the political work of literary aesthetics and to counter an overvaluation by critics of dissolution and disruption as political ends in themselves. But, this essay argues, such correctives assume a stability to realism that is belied by what Fredric Jameson describes as its “antinomies” and Jacques Rancière as its “edges.” If realism is to be a privileged form for thinking about the politics of aesthetics, critical models must account for realism’s particular capacity to hold divergent temporalities, antagonistic agencies, and conflicting worlds together. Finding a precursor to these debates over realism in Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (and in William Dean Howells’s critique of its “bitter” tone), this essay argues that the political force of Chesnutt’s novel lies in its mobilization of all realism’s formal capacities in order to rupture the reality that white supremacists sought to construct.