New Literary History of America (Harvard University Press Reference Library) [Hardcover]

This massive tome is intended to be a new direction in attempts at writing the literary history of America. There's no implication that this volume is complete in any sense, but rather it's a provocation. They're saying that Linda Lovelace is an important part of who we are today as Americans. (And the argument, talking about autobiography and memoir, rather than pornography, is fairly compelling.) And the "today" part is clearly understood by the editors and the authors. We can look up online, on a whim, a biography of Nathan Hale, a critique of Elvis's movies, or a sampling of what was popular fiction in 1850. Wikipedia and Google are our friends. A book like this therefore needs to be very different. I doesn't need to include the fight over the publication of "Howl" and can analyze the importance of Dr. Seuss instead.

The articles are organized chronologically from 1507 ("America" first appearing on a map) through Barack Obama's election (in collage form) with a higher density of 20th century material. The official website for the book, [...], has the table of contents and a list of the contributors.

Some highlights include Avital Ronell discussing telephony (1876), Walter Mosley on the hardboiled detective noir (1926), Rob Wilson looking at Hawaii's Queen Lili'uokalani (1896), and Susan Castillo's interesting take on the Salem Witchtrials (1692). I skipped around more or less at random in the book, with some titles catching my eye and leading me in. Different articles follow different styles, but there seems to be an energy in the text that I found pleasantly surprising. After all, this is a book which could be assigned, as a burden, to a student, but is intended instead to be read for pleasure.

The negatives? Well, the obvious one is that even with ten times the length, there would be gaps both serious and trivial. The Civil War doesn't seem to get as much coverage as one would think it should. The early sparks of Modernism are scattered between several different essays (1912, 1913, 1922, 1925) which speak to both the importance and the lingering uncertainty as to where the importance lays. Still, this volume offers its 200 essays with the clear view that letting these many flowers bloom is more important than listing all of the flowers of the world.

There's a lot of material in this book, I would confidently say there's something for everyone, and much to discuss with friends and neighbors. (Do folks still do, discuss serious books with their neighbors? Well, at the dinner party at least.) Sarah Vowell connects "American Gothic" with the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Discuss. Gish Jen looks at where The Catcher in the Rye lands in the literary canon (with the word "canon" only mentioned once). Discuss.

Here's my recommendation: buy the book, enjoy it, learn something, search online for more information, and make some interesting, odd connections between essays. If you're not convinced yet, read the reviews on Salon, the New York Times, and take a look at the website for the book. Me, I'm off to Hiawatha Falls here in Minneapolis with a new appreciation of Longfellow thanks to David Treuer (1822).

First off, if you really want to know about American literary history, read one of these other books instead:

"A History of American Literature," by Richard Gray (Blackwell, 2004).

"From Puritanism to Postmodernism," by Bradbury and Rulan. (Penguin, 1992).

If you want an unusually readable reference book, try

"The Chronology of American Literature," edited by Daniel S. Burt (Houghton, 2004).

Gray's literary history is truly informative and a fine read, too. It demonstrates a deep and unitary understanding of American Lit on every one of his 800+ pages - all of which he wrote himself, without the help of 200 committee members, as required by Marcus & Sollors. Bradbury & Rulan's work is more concise, and so maybe even better as an intro to the subject.

And now, sadly, to the work at hand.

"Literature," quite frankly, isn't what it's about. As co-editor Greil Marcus (a rock critic by profession) told the N.Y. Times, "We didn't want to call it a *cultural* history because [that's] too trendy." That description would have come closer to the truth, but "too trendy" implies it wouldn't have been taken seriously. Hmmm.

"History" (a narrative that unifies disparate threads) appears to be just a word the publishers (yes, the folks at Harvard's Belknap Press!)feel like using in the title. Nor is it a "reference book," as they also choose to describe it. (It's made up of opinionated essays, not reference material.)

Running through this project like a campus streaker is the essentially anti-intellectual faith that nothing's more important than what's hot. So, on the positive side, if you're looking for 200 readable bits on American culture, with factoids galore, you'll like the book. But if you're interested in a deeper appreciation of American fiction, poetry, and drama (and even film), you may not be quite so pleased. Many of the contributors seem to be chiefly interested in showing how clever they are.

An entire essay, for example, asserts that the plain-as-dirt biography of porn queen Linda Lovelace is a central document of modern American literature. Literary history? Or a gee-whiz editorial move? You be the judge. (Lovelace, BTW, describes her porn career as "slavery" and "torture," but the essayist sees her as a champion of "early feminism." She concludes that Lovelace would be miffed to know her throaty screen work is not now easily rentable.)

It's unfortunate too that one of the most significant novels of the '60s, Heller's "Catch-22," is discussed not by a literary historian but by someone credentialed merely as a "Writer, Brooklyn."

John Picker's full-length essay on "Yankee Doodle" and "The Star-Spangled Banner" is excellent, however, as are a number of others, though their excellence often has nothing to with "literary history."

And that's a big part of the problem.

Did the Vietnam War affect American literature? Apparently not, since the relevant chapter, by a Vietnamese scholar at Hanoi University, focuses on My Lai instead.

How about George W. Bush? Was his response to Hurricane Katrina a moment of profound literary import? What does the "essay" made up of graffiti-like silhouettes inspired by the election of Barack Obama tell us about, say, the actual writings of Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, or Malcom X? Yes, they're discussed elsewhere, but the perspective and depth of focus of this "history" are both off, sometimes in very curious ways.

The dust jacket design gives a good idea of what the book is like. Colorful little nuggets, like a tasty breakfast cereal! With lots of sugar, marketing flash, and some actual nutritional value here and there.

The editors have sagely approved trivialization and self-promotion as righteous competition for knowledge and understanding. I give their book two stars (twice what it deserves) because individual parts are sometimes as good (cogent and informative) as the whole pretends to be.

A disappointing collection--quirky, self-indulgent, uneven. It is hard to imagine what kind of reader would benefit from reading this volume. Most of the essays are little more than primers on their writers or events (Farah Griffin on Morrison, Greil Marcus on Powers). Many are written by scholars rehashing in capsule form what they or others have presented more richly elsewhere--a quickie on imperialism, anyone? Some are by writers using the author or event as a springboard for meditations ranging from the trite to the clever--Hawthorne is a flimsy pretext for Mukherjee to rehearse, for the umpteenth time, her Bengali Brahmin pedigree and her revolutionary defiance in marrying a white man. Some are from unknown and mediocre scholars writing about areas from which the major scholars have been mysteriously omitted--were the editors really so clueless about these fields, or did they just subcontract these fields to friends and former graduate students?
There are a couple of fine pieces--Walter Mosley on detective fiction , Ishmael Reed on Huck Finn, the essay on Linda Lovelace--but these are too few to make this a worthwhile purchase. If an anthology with over 200 pieces turns up only a handful of standouts, its claims as a "reference" book are overblown. For scholars looking at this volume as a reference, individual pieces would need to be evaluated carefully, since several are written by people who are not experts in the field.