The Historical Context

The story of the American literature anthology really begins in the late nineteenth century with the desire of a number of university scholars to formalize the study of their nation's own literary artists. Although more than a century had passed since the United States gained its political freedom from Great Britain, English departments in American universities as of 1900 still had not fully achieved a sense of literary independence. Americans, harboring a sense of provincial inferiority, were wary about maintaining that their own literary past could be ranked with the hallowed traditions of England and Europe. American literature was very young by comparison, and most of the reading public — including all but a few academic scholars — believed that American literature was not yet as aesthetically elevated as the literature of the Old World. Universities did occasionally offer courses in designated types of American writers in the final decades of the nineteenth century, but for a student to announce an intention to study literature at this time invariably meant that the student would study English literature.

The slow growth of an academic curriculum in American literature seems lethargic indeed when contrasted to the maturation of other curricula of academic study in American universities at the time, such as American history. Less than 10 percent of the more than 150 universities in the United States had developed fledgling graduate programs in American literature by 1900, and according to Kermit Vanderbilt's landmark study, American Literature and the Academy: Roots, Growth, and Maturity of a Profession (1986), "only four Ph.D.s had emerged in the field." By contrast, scholars of American historical studies reported that "almost nine-tenths of the historical dissertations written in American universities in the Eighties and Nineties dealt with native subjects." By the 1890s most universities were offering equal selections of courses in ancient, European, and American history. Even within the relatively few colleges that were teaching American poetry and prose, the literature of England and other modern European languages received vastly more attention.

Attempts by literary scholars to organize during the 1880s managed to move their profession toward specialized treatments of American literature. In 1883, together with nearly forty language and literature specialists from universities around the country, A. Marshall Elliott founded the Modern Language Association of America, and one year later that group published the first edition of the Publications of the Modern Language Association of America. Also instrumental at about this time, suggests Vanderbilt, was a national consciousness of the deaths of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in the 1880s and then of James Russell Lowell (1891), John Greenleaf Whittier (1892), Oliver Wendell Holmes (1894), and Harriet Beecher Stowe (1896), which "appear to have deepened a sense that an era had ended and could begin to be duly assessed."

Book-length collections of American literature marketed for the general public also played a crucial role in shifting national attention to its own literary past. Although these collections had been popular with American readers since the mid-1800s, colleges only gradually adopted this anthology format in the classroom. Evelyyn Bibb's invaluable study of literary anthologies records that several scholars trace "the first true college text" of American literature back to John Seely Hart's Manual of American Literature, published in 1872 (scholars likewise credit Hart with offering, at Princeton, the first college course in American literature at an American university that same year). Hart's collection, like its contemporaries that were intended for a more general readership, was suggestive of a biographical dictionary or encyclopedia supplemented by small excerpts of poems and prose and represented the work of literally hundreds of American authors. Concerning the logic of these early anthologies, Bibb explained, "The general aim is full coverage of the literature; and [an] underlying assumption is that a sampling of the work of an author is better than no representation at all." Detailed attention to factual data and biography and the absence of historical and interpretive information characterized these first literary collections. But despite such limitations, Hart's anthology laid out the format for subsequent classroom texts.

Coinciding with the rising interest in American letters in the American academy during the 1880s, the next stage in the development of the academic American literary anthology grew out of attempts by scholars to apply critical methodology to the study of literature. In November 1878 Moses Coit Tyler published his renowned two-volume Literary History of the American Revolution, a work of great importance for having pioneered the art of literary historiography. Tyler's connective critical approach revolutionized American literature studies, and for at least the next half-century it became the dominant mode in academic literary scholarship. Forty years later the editors of The Cambridge History of American Literature (1917–21), which Vanderbilt lauds as an "epochal" achievement in the history of American literary study, praised Tyler's work as "notable and still unsurpassed."

Moving the study of literature beyond mere biography and fact gathering, literary historiographers such as Tyler essentially approached the body of American letters as a portal to the American mind and spirit. According to them, American literature (which in concept at that time also included political and scientific documents) was the written record of the American cultural milieu, and, as such, it reflected and preserved the nation's fundamental characteristics and thought. "There is but one thing more interesting than the intellectual history of a man," declared Tyler in his literary history of colonial America, "and that is the intellectual history of a nation." As an archival repository of the American spirit literature was at best considered only secondarily as a formidable artistic expression. For literary historiography the works of literature themselves became a means for study rather than the subject of study. Literary historians did make small gestures toward demonstrating aesthetic values in the literature, but their critical comments (by modern standards) were vague and impressionistic. Despite these shortcomings, Tyler and other literary historians provided academic American literary studies with an incipient...