Content Introduction I chapter Ancient American Literature

References

1 By cultural studies I refer to scholarship that emphasizes a decentered understanding of the dissemination of ideas and art. Typically, work in cultural studies seeks to destabilize distinctions between high and low cultures, and, if anything, privileges the popular over the elite. Methodologically, cultural-studies scholarship emphasizes narratives of race, class, and gender, and approaches culture as a product of social, economic, and/or political forces. The practice of cultural studies therefore tends to privilege interdisciplinary work, deemphasizes the genius of the author/creator, and is deeply skeptical of grand unifying narratives to explain cultural phenomena. For these very reasons, cultural studies means many things to many different scholars: for some it carries a specific set of ideological (particularly Marxist) imperatives, for others it involves a debunking of traditional canons, narratives, and other hierarchies. In this essay, I am using it in a broad sense to refer to the current zeitgeist in literary (and to a certain extent historical) studies. For an example of the diversity of work that fits under the rubric of cultural studies see the collection of essays edited by Grossberg, Lawrence, Nelson, Cary, and Treichler, Paula A. under the title Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992)Google Scholar.


2 For the classic example see Matthiessen, F. O., American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941)Google Scholar.


3 Perhaps the scholar most identified with the effort to dismantle the canon of the American renaissance in the 1980s was Tompkins, Jane, with her Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985)Google Scholar. Walter Benn Michaels, Donald Pease, and Eric Sundquist also published important works challenging the established narrative of nineteenth-century American literary history.