American Literary History in Pieces

Daniel Diez Couch’s American Fragments offers a scholarly analysis of the fragment, a mainstay of American print culture in the early national period. In American Fragments, Couch argues that fragments were central to both American aesthetics and American political culture. Insisting that the fragment was an inclusive and progressive form that invited readers to consider the relationship between a part and the whole, Couch shows how fragments helped Americans understand themselves and their place in a democratic republic. Couch’s book is deeply researched, and it provides insightful readings of well-known texts like Hannah Fosters’s The Coquette, Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly, and Washington Irving’s Sketch Book while also introducing readers to a host of poems and other shorter writings that appeared in newspapers, periodicals, and gift books throughout the early nineteenth century. The original research in American Fragments is engaging, and it is also emblematic of a new wave of scholarship enabled by the widespread digitization of books and newspapers in that it introduces so many new texts that are difficult to connect to existing timelines and canons. In this respect, Couch’s book also reveals the limitations of the monograph as a tool for revisioning our collective scholarly project.[R]ight now, the scholarship pushing us to reimagine our literary past is running ahead of the forms in which it might be published.