Remaking Early American Literary Studies (Again)

This review essay considers the edited collection American Literature in Transition: The Long Nineteenth Century, 1770–1828, in relation to current shifts in the field of early American literary studies away from New Historicist methodologies toward a concern with topics such as form, genre, and networks. Seeking to interrogate longstanding critical assumptions about the danger of “grand narratives” and “bounded wholes,” it asks whether potentially progressive alternatives to concepts of transition and contingency are possible. At a moment when early Americanist scholarship, and the institutional and political contexts for it, are in a heightened state of flux, what emerging lines of inquiry are likely to have an ongoing influence and to what degree are critics working on the long eighteenth century engaged in a shared project?[T]he still-dominant academic rhetoric of rupture, unsettling, liminality, et al. may sometimes be a barrier to practically arriving at reconstituted models of the social order[;] there is a delicate balancing act to be achieved between recognizing resistant specificity and knitting individual perspectives together.