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Literary Retrospectives: The 1890s and the Reconstruction of American Literary History

Hooks, Karin L.

Abstract Details

2012, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, English.
This dissertation proposes that the 1890s were critical to the formation of American literature because of their focus on identifying, collecting, and preserving an American literary tradition. Since 1930, when Fred Lewis Pattee claimed that the twentieth century began in the 1890s, a continuing strain in literary criticism has investigated the decade as the birthplace of modernism. In recent years, however, scholars have begun troubling these historical assessments of the era in order to recover a more nuanced understanding of the decade. Building on their work, I study how competing narratives of American literature existed in the 1890s alongside the fin de siècle movement toward literary nationalism. I recover a group of long-lost literary historians who envisioned a more inclusive American literary canon than was eventually adopted in the early years of the twentieth century. I use the term “scenes of negotiation” to refer to discussions of American literature in late nineteenth-century social discourse about the development of a national American literary tradition. More specifically, I argue that these scenes of negotiation can be read as literary history because no fixed narrative of American literature yet existed. These scenes of negotiation make discernible how accounts of literary history emerged at multiple sites, in multiple genres, through multiple agents. The Introduction identifies some of these scenes of negotiation and explains why they should be read as American literary history, which records the history of literature in America through an examination of texts and/or authors. Organized around specific case studies, the chapters explore how literary historians working singly or in conjunction with others documented the 1890s as a period of literary retrospection and consolidation. Chapter 1 investigates how Edmund Stedman and Ellen Hutchinson’s co-editorship of A Library of American Literature resulted in one of the late nineteenth century’s most important and formative constructions of American literature. Chapter 2 explores how The Critic’s elections for “The Forty Immortals” and “The Twenty Immortelles” proposed a gendered model of authorship that closely resembles the current state of the field of American literature. Chapter 3 examines how Pauline Hopkins worked as a cultural stenographer, writing an inclusive account of American literary history in her novel Contending Forces that included African Americans, a group largely ignored in A Library of American Literature and The Critic’s elections. Chapter 4 recovers the late nineteenth-century genre of obituary literature as a forum for validating male and female American authorship in order to illustrate how it aided in the development of an American literary tradition. This dissertation reaches three conclusions that provide a new framework for understanding the types of cultural work being done in the 1890s. First, scenes of negotiation document how the literary historians identified herein understood American literature’s role in recording the nation’s social and political development and in instilling cultural pride and patriotism in its citizenship. Second, scenes of negotiation unsettle traditional notions about who was writing literary history and the venues in which it was being written. Third, scenes of negotiation offer an alternative to traditional literary histories, revealing that some late nineteenth-century literary historians were determined to include female and minority authors in the American literary tradition. Recovering these scenes of negotiation changes our current understanding of the 1890s as an era lost to literary history by showing it a period alive with literary history and demonstrating that late nineteenth-century literary historians made possible the canon wars of the twentieth century by their recording of the rich and diverse American literary past.
Elizabeth Renker, PhD (Advisor)
Steven Fink, PhD (Committee Member)
Andrea Williams, PhD (Committee Member)
267 p.

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Hooks, K. L. (2012). Literary Retrospectives: The 1890s and the Reconstruction of American Literary History [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1338301078

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Hooks, Karin. Literary Retrospectives: The 1890s and the Reconstruction of American Literary History. 2012. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1338301078.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Hooks, Karin. "Literary Retrospectives: The 1890s and the Reconstruction of American Literary History." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2012. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1338301078

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)