Canons by Consensus: Critical Trends and American Literature Anthologies (Amer Lit Realism & Naturalism)

286 Pages·2004·1.98 MB·English

by  Joseph Csicsila

Canons by Consensus
Studies in American Literary Realism and Naturalism
series editor
Gary Scharnhorst
editorial board
Louis J. Budd
Donna Campbell
John Crowley
Robert E. Fleming
Eric Haralson
Katherine Kearns
Joseph McElrath
George Monteiro
Brenda Murphy
James Nagel
Alice Hall Petry
Donald Pizer
Tom Quirk
Jeanne Campbell Reesman
Ken Roemer
Susan Rosowski
Canons
by
Consensus
Critical Trends and
American Literature Anthologies
JOSEPH CSICSILA
Foreword by Tom Quirk
The University of Alabama Press
Tuscaloosa
Copyright © 2004
The University of Alabama Press
Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Typeface: Minion
∞
The paper on which this book is printed
meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard
for Information Science–Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI Z39.48–1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Csicsila, Joseph, 1968–
Canons by consensus : critical trends and American literature anthologies / Joseph Csicsila ;
foreword by Tom Quirk.
p. cm. — (Studies in American literary realism and naturalism)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8173-1397-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. American literature—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 2. Literature
publishing—United States. 3. Criticism—United States. 4. Anthologies—Editing.
5. Canon (Literature) I. Title. II. Series.
PS25.C78 2004
810.9—dc22
2003027608
Sections of chapter four have appeared in Essays in Arts and Sciences (XXIX) October 2000
and Mark Twain Among the Scholars, ed. Richard Hill and Jim McWilliams.
Albany, NY: Whitston Publishing Co., 2002.
For Larry, Alan, and Joe
Three wise men

Contents
Foreword by Tom Quirk ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction xv
1. The Historical Context 1
2. Early- and Mid-Nineteenth-Century Prose:
Irving, Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville 23
3. Nineteenth-Century Poetry: Whitman, Dickinson, Alice Cary,
Phoebe Cary, Larcom, Thaxter, Lanier, Tabb 55
4. Post–Civil War Prose: Twain, Harte, Howells, James 86
5. Latter-Nineteenth-Century Prose: Stowe, Jewett,
Freeman, Chopin 133
6. The African American Heritage: Equiano, Jacobs, Douglass,
Dunbar, Chesnutt, Harper 166
7. Early-Twentieth-Century Women Writers: Wharton,
Cather, Glasgow 181
Epilogue 207
Notes 211
Bibliography 233
Index 245

Foreword
Tom Quirk
Joseph Csicsila’s Canons by Consensus: Critical Trends and American Lit-
erature Anthologies is an innovative piece of scholarship—provocative by
implication, lucid in presentation, steady in judgment. What the author
has done is to methodically drill test bores through strata of represen-
tations of American literature in eighty-plus anthologies from 1919 to
1999. By restricting his focus to a limited, but still signi¤cant, number of
American writers and tracing their critical fortunes through these class-
room textbooks, he is able to contest and even contradict a number of
rash assumptions about canon formation, including polemical accusa-
tions of deliberate or inadvertent sexism and racism involving a long
line of literary scholars and editors. No one in the future ought to be
able to make overarching claims about the American literary canon
without ¤rst checking out here the facts of the cases in question. For
Csicsila’s book describes in empirical fashion just what those facts are.
What is more, he charts the ®uctuations of literary reputation as they
fared through three “generations” of anthologies. One risk the author
ran in addressing the subject in these chronological layers was that his
arguments would become repetitious as he traced author after author
through generations of anthologies. But this is not the case. The prose is
nuanced throughout and situates the critical trends within contempo-