American literature at the beginning of 20th century contents introduction

Chapter II. American Literary Historiography of 20^th century
2.1. 20th, and 21st century American literature and poetry
Drawing attention to how Jefferson used the Declaration of Independence to create an anti-British national narrative from isolated events in isolated colonies, David Thelen emphasizes in The Making of History and the Making of the United States (1998) that "from 1776 until about 1960 of the 1970s or 1970s, it was possible to believe - and it was hard to doubt it - that nations were or even should have been the embodiment of human destinies, that nations could express their identity, solve their problems and entrust their dreams and destinies. Modern historical practice was born a couple of centuries ago to serve this process, invent narratives and persuade peoples to interpret their personal experience in national terms and narratives” (373). A similar goal can be set for the literary histories of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Claudio Guillén (6), David Perkins (4), René Velleck and Austin Warren (51) reminded us, among others. Beginning with John Neal's The American Writers (1824–1825), American literary historiography adopted this nationalist paradigm strongly, seeking to bring out specifically "American" qualities in America's newly emerging national literature. However, in their attempts to define and defend an autonomous American literary identity from British slanders (e.g., Sidney Smith's "Who Reads an American Book?"), many nineteenth-century historians of American literature not only highlighted specifically "American" elements in American literary texts. ; they also, in a kind of counter-hegemonic gesture, challenged perceived British cultural superiority by systematically limiting European—and especially British—“influence” on American literature. As I recently demonstrated in Reading National American Literary Historiography Internationally, "these literary histories linked strategies for the formation of American literary and cultural identity with strategies for literary and cultural differentiation and dissociation from Great Britain" in an attempt to reconfigure interliterary relations and redefine their attendant relations. . hierarchies of cultural power (201, 209).
In the early twentieth century, this instrumentalization of literary historiography in the service of America's literary and cultural nation-building was intensified by the need to justify the establishment of departments of American literature at universities throughout the country. Emphasizing the intensity of this "campaign to study American literature" (Vanderbilt 186), Kermit
Vanderbilt quotes Randolph Bourne as insisting in 1914 that "we need to cultivate a 'new American nationalism' like the 'cultural chauvinism' of the French" (Vanderbilt 207). Thus literary history, as Henry Seidel Canby notes in his review of Norman Förster's American Literature Rethinking (1928), was even more strongly urged to "discover how much American literature is American, and when so, why" (qtd. in Vanderbilt 58). Richard Ruland summarized the political significance of these historiographical constructions of America's literary identity as follows: "It seems that the need to define a distinct field in order to ensure its academic acceptability eventually led to the extreme position that the insistence on, after all, the uniqueness of American literature was more a political than a literary idea, that the objective study of national art was often replaced by an insistence on its conformity to national identity and destiny” .
This challenge to establish the uniqueness of American literature led to the continuation of the historiographical configurations of nineteenth-century American literary identity well into the twentieth century. To justify the existence of American literature as a separate discipline, it required, first of all, its rhetorical separation from British literature and culture. Christopher Balm confirms that "in the conceptual world of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, clear cultural boundaries were necessary to secure identity and express ideas of difference and even superiority in relation to other nations and cultures" . In American literary historiography, this is particularly evident in the essentialist, homogenizing conceptualization of "American" literature and culture, in contrast to their European and, in particular, British counterparts. As Ian Tyrrell notes in American Exceptionalism in the Age of International History (1991), "the tradition of exceptionalism involved an essentialist dichotomy between 'America' and 'Europe'" (1034). For this reason, many literary historians of the early twentieth century have reduced their discussions of American intercultural and interliterary relations to a Eurocentric-reductionist description.