Writing American Literary History Sacvan Bercovitch (ed.), The Cambridge History of American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994–2005, £495.00). Volume One: 1590–1820 (1994, £70.00). Pp. xiii+829. ISBN 0 521 30105 [squf ]. Volume Two: Prose Writing, 1820–1865 (1995, £75.00). Pp. xviii+887. ISBN 0 521 30106 8. Volume Three: Prose Writing, 1860–1920 (2005, £80.00). Pp. xi+813. ISBN 0 521 30107 6. Volume Four: Nineteenth-Century Poetry, 1800–1910 (2004, £75.00). Pp. x+562. ISBN 0 521 30108 4. Volume Five: Poetry and Criticism, 1900–1950 (2003, £75.00). Pp. xi+624. ISBN 0 521 30109 2. Volume Six: Prose Writing, 1910–1950 (2002, £70.00). Pp. xx+620. ISBN 0 521 49731 0. Volume Seven: Prose Writing, 1940–1990 (1999, £75.00). Pp. xxiii+795. ISBN 0 521 49732 9. Volume Eight: Poetry and Criticism, 1940–1995 (1996, £75.00). Pp. viii+545. ISBN 0 521 49733 7.

Extract

Each generation needs to rewrite literary history. And it may be that this generation needs to do it more than most, if only because the proliferation of schools and theories has turned what was once common critical ground into a battlefield. American books, among others, have become a site of struggle, and American writers have been among those caught in the criss-crossing searchlights of ethnic and gender studies, interdisciplinary investigations and studies of popular culture, language and communication. Just how far things have gone can be measured by the fact that every term in the phrase “history of American literature,” is now open to debate. The textuality of history and the historicity of the text have become the most contentious issues in contemporary criticism, while the question of nationhood, in particular, is under scrutiny. In a famous phrase, Walt Whitman described his work as a language experiment, an attempt to summon a nation into being through words. The slippery, plural nature of American identity and the bewildering contingencies of American history that drove Whitman to say this feed into the more challenging of the recent accounts of American writing.