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Full Description
Drawing from the social theories of Niklas Luhmann and Mary Douglas, Predicting the Past advocates a reflexive understanding of the paradoxical institutional dynamic of American literary history as a professional discipline and field of study. Contrary to most disciplinary accounts, Michael Boyden resists the utopian impulse to offer supposedly definitive solutions for the legitimation crises besetting American literature studies by "going beyond" its inherited racist, classist, and sexist underpinnings. Approaching the existence of the American literary tradition as a typically modern problem generating diverse but functionally equivalent solutions, Boyden argues how its peculiarity does not, as is often supposed, reside in its restrictive exclusivity but rather in its massive inclusivity which drives it to constantly revert to a self-negating "beyond" perspective. Predicting the Past covers a broad range of both well-known and lesser known literary histories and reference works, from Rufus Griswold's 1847 Prose Writers of America to Sacvan Bercovitch's monumental Cambridge History of American Literature. Throughout, Boyden focuses on particular themes and topics illustrating the selfinduced complexity of American literary history such as the early "Anglocentric" roots theories of American literature; the debate on contemporary authors in the age of naturalism; the plurilingual ethnocentrism of the pioneer Americanists of the mid-twentieth century; and the genealogical misrepresentation of founding figures such as Jonathan Edwards, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Lowell.
Contents
Introduction
• A Forensic Approach to American Literary History
• Revisiting the "End" of American Literature
• Outline of the Chapters
The "Pre-History" of American Literat ure: Early Prospects (1850-1910)
• The Future of an Illusion
• Nationalizing the Past
• The Rhetoric of Race
• Teaching and Preaching
• Why Textbooks (Never) Lie
• The Taboo on Provincialism
Live and Let Live: Debati ng Contemporary Literat ure (1890-1930)
• Explaining Antiquarianism
• The Temptations of the Flesh
• Culture and Scholarship
• Explaining Anti-Antiquarianism
• Historians of the Present
• Facts and Factors
The Uses of Language: Literary Polyvocality and Ethnic Continuity (1880-1950)
• Legends about Language in the U.S.
• Dequarantining "American" Languages
• The Continuation of "Anglocentrism continued"
• The Languages of P(l)ur(al)ism
• The Limits of Cosmopolitanism
• America as a "Unipolar" Culture?
Precursors and Exemplars: Genealogies in American Literary History
• The Priority of Jonathan Edwards
• Multiple Awakenings
• The Dickinson Myth
• How Dickinson Became an Intolerable Woman Author
• The (Not So) Personal Voice: The Confessional Poets
• The Matthew Effect
Conclusion: Nothing Realy Ends
