preface and acknowledgements

In this history of American literature, I have tried to be responsive to the immense changes that have taken place over the past thirty to forty years in the study of literature in general and American literature in particular: changes that, among other things, have put the whole issue of just what is American and exactly what constitutes literature into contention. Interdisciplinary studies, gender, ethnic and popular culture studies, critical and cultural theory have all complicated and problematized our notion of what literature is. And the debates initiated by these newly developed fields of study have, very often, gathered around and found their focus in American books. I have also tried to tell a story: about the continued inventing of communities, and the sustained imagining of nations, that constitute the literary history of the part of the American continent which came to be known as the United States. My story has had to be a selective one. Most readers will soon discover some authors to whom I have given less than their due, in terms of attention and discussion, and others to whom I have not even managed to give a mention. Apart from apologizing for this, pleading the excuse all literary historians have eventually to give – the excuse, that is, which Herman Melville famously summarized as the limited draughts of time, strength, cash and patience on which all mortals draw – I should perhaps add one thing. While necessarily being selective, I have nevertheless tried to be as true as I can be to the whole range of American diversity and difference: the multiple and often conflicting communities that have been involved in writing their region or nation. What I have been after here, in short, is to tell a tale of an ongoing series of texts resistant to any simply totalizing vision: to write, not so much the literary history as the literary histories of America.

Another way of putting this might be to say that my aim here – shaped by the emphasis recent American literary scholarship has placed on the authority of difference – has been to ‘uninvent’ the reading of American literature that sees America in monolithic and millennial terms, and that restricts attention to literature in the sense of the published and widely distributed poem, fiction and play. The more widely available and canonical material of course constitutes a substantial and

significant element in what I look at, but it is not the only one. I have tried to be responsive to the fundamentally plural character of American history and culture by acknowledging and talking about other powerful traditions, some of them oral, political or popular, others marginalized and denied publication until recently. My hope is that what the reader will find here, as a result, is the story of a literature that is, and always has been, multiple, conflicted. But what he or she will also find here, if I have had any success at all in realizing my aims, is the story of a vast number of individuals and communities animated by a connected series of aims and by the sense of a past held, however cruelly or painfully, in common. This history, while aimed at unravelling any simple, singular notion of its subject, has also been driven by a related set of arguments – and, more particularly, by an interest in that process by which communities and nations continually remake themselves.

My debts here are vast, to generations of scholars in the field and, in particular, to all those who have enlarged the materials and the meanings of American literature over the past three or four decades. To that extent, this book situates itself as one fragment, one small voice in a much larger and continuing debate. But for the preliminary critical model for the whole story I am trying to tell, I have specific debts to acknowledge, since it is based on the premise that, as Fredric Jameson has argued, historical epochs are not monolithic integrated social formations. On the contrary, they are complex overlays of different methods of production that serve as the bases of different social groups and classes and, consequently, of their world views. It is because of this that, in any given epoch, a variety of antagonisms can be discerned, conflicts between different interest groups. One culture may well be dominant, but there will also be – to borrow Raymond Williams’s useful terms – a residual culture, formed in the past but still active in the cultural process, and an emergent culture, prescribing new meanings and practices. Writers, according to this model, like any other members of society, are not the victims or agents of some totalizing structure, since – to quote Williams – ‘no dominant culture ever in reality includes or exhausts all human practices, human energy and human intention’. So they are able, and perhaps even obliged, to insert themselves in the space between warring interests and practices and then dramatize the contradictions the conflict engenders. Throughout their work, by means of a mixture of voices, a free play of various languages (and sometimes even genres), they can represent the reality of their culture as multiple, complex and internally antagonistic. They can achieve a realization of both synchrony and diachrony: a demonstration both of the continuities between past and present and of the processes by which those continuities are challenged, dissolved and reconstituted. They consequently have more chance than most members of their society do of realizing what Hayden White has called ‘the human capacity to endow lived contradictions with intimations of their possible transcendence’. They have the opportunity, in other words, of getting ‘into’ history, participating in its processes, and, in a perspectival sense at least, of getting ‘out’ of it too – enabling us, the readers, to begin to understand just how those processes work.

All this may sound intolerably abstract; it probably does. It is, however, a way for me to tease out, and to underscore, what I see as three fundamental points: points that are never really foregrounded or argued out in this history but are nevertheless there, feeding into and informing everything I try to say and providing me with something like a structure, a narrative pattern. First, social stability is an illusion, the preserve of pastoral dream and utopian vision – and, for that matter, of that idea of the writing into life of a New Eden that has tended to monopolize readings of American literature. At some moments, the pace of change may accelerate but change is the one constant, guaranteeing the plural character of any culture. Second, American culture and writing are surely only properly understood in these terms, as multiple and layered, composed of many different groups all trying to make sense of their lives and changes – and, in the process, construct their own imaginative community. And third, if anyone at all is likely to help us understand the exact forms that change has taken in America, the plurality of its cultures and the conflicting forces at work there, it is writers precisely because of the chance their writing gives them to live both ‘in’ and ‘out’ of history. Writers can help more than most to disclose to us the continuing acts of imagination that constitute the making of a nation.

There are other more personal debts, among them to the many students and colleagues who have helped me to what little I have learned about American literature over the past thirty years. I would like to thank all those I have met and communicated with in the British Association for American Studies, particularly during my stints as Associate Editor and then Editor of the Journal of American Studies, and my fellow scholars in the European Association for American Studies and the Southern Studies Forum. Friends at the British Academy, particularly Andrew Hook, Jon Stallworthy and Wynn Thomas, are to be thanked, for the advice and support they have given. So are colleagues at other universities in the United Kingdom, notably Susan Castillo, Kate Fullbrook, Mick Gidley, Judie Newman and Helen Taylor, at other universities in other parts of Europe, especially Jan Nordby Gretlund, Lothar Honnighausen and Waldemar Zacharasiewicz, in Asia, particularly Bob Lee, and in the United States, where I owe a special debt of gratitude to Saki Bercovitch, George Dekker and Marjorie Perloff. At the University of Essex, I have especially to thank my friend and colleague of over thirty years Herbie Butterfield, John Gillies and Peter Hulme, and my doctoral students, with particular thanks to one former doctoral student, Owen Robinson, who has now become a colleague. I would like to thank Brigitte Lee, too, for being such a meticulous, thoughtful and creative copy-editor. Acknowledgements should also be made to the University of Essex, the British Academy, and the Arts and Humanities Research Board for making some limited support available, and to the several universities and conferences that enabled me to try out my ideas – often persuading me to change them. More personally, I want to thank Andrew McNeillie at Blackwell, the best, most supportive and inspiring of editors and a good friend. On a more personal note still, my greatest debt is, as always, to my family. My older daughter, Catharine, now herself an academic in the United States, I want to thank here for

her quick wit, grace and subtle understanding, and for providing me with a delightful American son-in-law, Ricky, and two wonderful American grandsons, Sam and Zack. My older son, Ben, I thank in turn for keeping me on my intellectual toes, or trying to, for his good humour, thoughtfulness and commitment and, not least, for always being there when I need him. My younger daughter, Jessica, I want to thank for her lovely spirit, her lively intelligence and kindness, the constant delight of her conversation and company, and for never taking me or my work too – or even at all – seriously. My younger son, Jack, I owe a debt of gratitude for his gentleness, his vitality and for his ability to teach me about the poverty of words sometimes: being without language, he has reminded me of other, deeper ways of communicating. He and my other children and my grandchildren, thanks to their energy, their apparently endless funds of resilience, have also helped give me faith in the future, despite everything. The final and deepest debt of all is, as ever, to my wife, Sheona. By encouraging and advising me, especially when the work hit a problem or the possibility of ever completing it seemed to recede, she became, in a real sense, one of the hidden authors of this book. More than that, she has given me memories and hope, not just while researching and writing this but always. That is why, as one small token of my gratitude for all she has given me, this history of a subject that has consumed my interests and attention for all my professional career, is dedicated to her.