Literature in the Making OXFORD STUDIES IN AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY Gordon Hutner, Series Editor Family Money Jeffory A. Clymer America’s England Christopher Hanlon Writing the Rebellion Philip Gould Antipodean America Paul Giles Living Oil Stephanie LeMenager Making Noise, Making News Mary Chapman Territories of Empire Andy Doolen Propaganda 1776 Russ Castronovo Playing in the White Stephanie Li Literature in the Making Nancy Glazener Surveyors of Customs Joel Pfister The Moral Economies of American Authorship Susan M. Ryan After Critique Mitchum Huehls Literature in the Making a history of u.s. literary culture in the long nineteenth century Nancy Glazener 1 1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. 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Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Glazener, Nancy. Literature in the making: a history of U.S. literary culture in the long nineteenth century/Nancy Glazener. pages cm.—(Oxford studies in American literary history) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-939013-7 (cloth)—ISBN 978-0-19-939014-4 (updf) 1. American literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Literature and society—United States—History—19th century. 3. Literary movements—United States—History–19th century. I. Title. PS201.G56 2015 810.9'355—dc23 2015005674 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Typeset in Minion Pro Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper For Ben and David Foster { Contents } Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Literary History as the History of “Literature” 3 Scholarly Supports for This Study 7 Literature as Modern and Antimodern 12 How This Study Proceeds 16 1. Organizing Literature 20 Looking for Literature in the Eighteenth Century 21 The Problem with Poetry 24 Phillis Wheatley and the Transformation of Poetry 29 The Genres of Literature 36 The Two Canons 43 2. Literature, Civil Society, and the State 53 Print, Aesthetic Autonomy, and the History of Censorship 54 Literature in the Marketplace 63 3. Studying Literature 71 Shakespeare, Modern and Antimodern 74 Where Shakespeare Was Studied 83 How Literature Was Studied 95 Taste, Belles Lettres, and the Sublime 106 Coleridge, Emerson, and the Legacies of Moral Philosophy 109 4. Lost Episodes from Public Literary Culture 119 The St. Louis Movement and the Concord School 120 Dueling Bards 128 The Browning Society in the United States 136 A Library of American Literature 148 5. Literary Species and Academic Toolkits 161 Clash of the Titans: Novels versus Poetry 165 Crafting Conflicts 179 6. Disciplinarity and Beyond 193 Literature as Disciplinary 195 Literature as Interdisciplinary 205 Literature as Antidisciplinary 210 Coda 217 Notes 225 Index 313 { Acknowledgments } This book interrupted and then absorbed parts of an earlier book project on which I had been working for some time, so there are many people whose advice and support have helped me along the way and whom I am eager to thank. Some of them helped in more than one capacity. I hope that anyone I missed here knows I am grateful. Several generous readers reviewed most or all of the manuscript and offered excellent advice. James R. Kincaid moved to Pittsburgh just in time to become my most hardworking and judicious reader close at hand, reading this book in a couple of incarnations and offering crucial encouragement and advice. Deidre Shauna Lynch, who has been one of my best readers since our days in graduate school, offered astute suggestions about the whole manuscript and shared with me her wonderful book Loving Literature in manuscript. I am fortunate to have had the very best press readers for this book imaginable, Stephanie Foote and Elizabeth Renker, Their detailed suggestions about my long manuscript and their attention to its best possibilities, along with Gordon Hutner’s wise counsel, have made it a better book. Any errors that remain are Jim Kincaid’s fault. Many other interlocutors offered valuable advice and feedback on stretches of this book or projects that ended up contributing to this book: Susan Balée, David Bartholomae, Dale M. Bauer, Troy Boone, Marah Gubar, Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, Daniel Morgan, Shalini Puri, James Seitz, Sandra Siegel, Susan Harris Smith, Angela Sorby, John Twyning, Jennifer Waldron, Courtney Weikle-Mills, Mary Saracino Zboray, and Ronald Zboray. A conversation with Brenda Glascott transformed my thinking about how the fields of composition and rhetoric might figure in this book. Alison Escher and Amanda Godley helped me identify and access current high school literature textbooks relevant for my work in chap- ter 5. Katie Homar offered me excellent ways to develop this project’s connections to British Romantic writing and scholarship. I’ve been especially fortunate to have Marianne Novy’s advice about navigating Shakespeare scholarship from an early stage of this project, and I’ve benefited as well from interchanges with other generous Shakespeare scholars: Curtis Breight, Jonathan Burton, Peggy Knapp, Zachary Lesser, John Twyning, Jennifer Waldron and Michael Witmore. I am grateful for Don Bialostosky’s ongoing intellectual camaraderie and his thoughtful responses to drafts of this project, offered while he has been a busy department chair and I’ve been director of graduate studies. The admin- istrative workload has sometimes been overwhelming, so it has been wonderful to have a channel open for talking about ideas. x Acknowledgments My work was furthered by the efforts of two excellent research assistants: Schuyler Chapman and Lisa Schwartz. I have benefited as well from being in dialogue with a number of people whose work on overlapping or adjoining topics has shaped my thinking: Mark Lynn Anderson, Jonathan Arac, Amy Blair, Jean Ferguson Carr, Stephen L. Carr, Neil Doshi, Carolyn Elliott, Jane Feuer, Jaime Harker, Hannah Johnson, Katherine Kidd, Andrea Lapin, Tara Lockhart, Christine Mahady, Elizabeth Oliphant, Kellie Robertson, Gayle Rogers, Mariolina Rizzi Salvatori, William Scott, Jennifer Schell, Clare Sigrist, Philip Smith, Swathi Sreerangarajan, and Brook Thomas. I am also grateful to several scholars who allowed me to read their then-unpublished scholarship that in- formed my work here: Sydney Bufkin, Margreta de Grazia, Beth Driscoll, Karin Hooks, and Erin A. Smith. At Oxford University Press, I benefited from the patient editorial support of Brendan O’Neill and Claudia Dukeshire. The love and encouragement of many friends and relatives have made my labors lighter. I want to thank the extended Glazener and Foster families for being diplomatic and kind about the book that took forever. Jayne Lewis, Deidre Lynch, Jennifer Pasternack, Shalini Puri, and Katie Trumpener were especially closely involved with my work on this book, as intellectual project and long-term life challenge, and it truly might not have been finished without them. Phil and Slu Smith have enriched my life in many ways, not least by modeling high standards of scholarship and teaching and great professional generosity. D’Ann Moutos and Shirley Shadix nourished my ambitions early in my life and have never stopped inspiring me. I am also grateful to more friends than I can name who have kept up my morale and made life more fun. The people whose support was most crucial lived with this book every day: Paul, David, and Ben Foster, who made sure that I took time out for bike rides and board games. Paul took over many tasks that made it possible for me to devote time to this book on top of teaching and administrative duties, and he was a good sounding board for every incarnation of this book as well as the project it interrupted. My sons, Ben and David, cheered me on and took an interest in my work. Ben honed his excellent style by proofreading and editing some of my work here, and David inspired and guided my interest in the worlds of fan fiction and Internet reading cultures. This book is dedicated to Ben and David with the hope that they will always find what they need in order to work on what’s important to them. I am grateful for permission to include here material that has been published in other forms. Chapters 1, 2, and 4 have drawn on my essay about “Women in Literary Culture during the Long Nineteenth Century” in The Cambridge History of American Women’s Literature, edited by Dale M. Bauer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Chapter 2 has adapted material from my discussion of “The Novel in Postbellum Print Culture” in The Cambridge History of the American Novel, edited by Leonard Cassuto, Clare Eby, and Benjamin Reiss (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Chapter 4 features analyses Acknowledgments xi tried out in “Print Culture as an Archive of Dissent: Or, Delia Bacon and the Case of the Missing Hamlet,” American Literary History 19.2 (Summer 2007), and in “The Browning Society in U.S.