J ULIA S TRAUB Mobility and the Canon: Discussing Literary Value in Early American Writing Concepts of the canon and canon formation have been important points of discussion in literary studies for the last forty years or so. Like any controversial concept, the canon raises many questions; still, there seems to be a certain consensus as far as our basic understanding of the term is concerned. To propose a neutral and broad definition, we use the word ‘canon’ today when talking about a corpus of secular literary texts deemed valuable and fit for preservation by a certain social group. Often the term is also used in its plural form to underline the fact that there is a multiplicity of canons and not just one. Furthermore, concepts of the canon these days place less emphasis on its solidity, i.e. the canon is regarded as changeable and subject to cultural developments. The concept of the canon and the theories that aim to elucidate it these days are closely linked to the notion of cultural memory, used here in reference to the work of Aleida Assmann. The building processes that lead towards the formation of canons are today seen as deeply reflective of the ways in which human beings deal with texts and how these texts shape their identities. 1 Canons are seen as important elements of cultural knowledge that is passed on from one generation to the next and thereby inextricably involved in the formation of collective identities. 2 1 Aleida Assmann, “Kanonforschung als Provokation der Literaturwissenschaft,” Macht - Kanon - Kultur: Theoretische, historische und soziale Aspekte ästhetischer Kanonbildungen, ed. Renate von Heydebrand (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1998), 59. Underlying any canon are evaluative processes. Evaluation includes both verbal and non-verbal practices which confer value on a particular work, which make it stand out from others by virtue of its selection. A good review that praises the quality of a poem is a very overt and verbal form of evaluation; a publisher’s decision to publish a particular manuscript a less conspicuous, non-verbal, but still powerful form. Evaluation, implying processes of appreciation and selection, is coupled with preservation, i.e. the work is meant to outlast the course of time and be made available for a future circle of readers. These three processes - appreciation, selection and preservation - are functionalized within contexts of communal identity-building: in general, canons speak for more than one person and imply collective rather than individual taste or opinion. They also imply consensus rather than exceptionality, and consistency rather than ran- 2 Assmann, 48. J ULIA S TRAUB 178 domness. Traditional approaches to the canon have regarded it as reflective of a nation’s character, based on the assumption that a national canon contains a nation’s most valuable works of literature and passes them on from one generation to the next. More recent voices in the canon debate stress the multiplicity of canons and their formative rather than reflective function: canons are no longer seen as the privilege of a nation as a geo-political entity, but as the property of communities that can be defined differently in political, religious or ethnic terms. As Barbara Herrnstein Smith has argued, all evaluative activities have the effect of “drawing the work into the orbit of attention of potential readers,” thereby creating its value. 3 She also underlined the randomness and changeability of allegedly intrinsic literary value: “the value of a literary work is continuously produced and re-produced by the very acts of implicit and explicit evaluation that are frequently invoked as ‘reflecting’ its value and therefore as being evidence of it.” 4 Given the ways in which the canon debate has been opened up over the last two decades, it may seem strange that relatively little work has been done on a canon discourse in the United States of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Smith analyzed the concept of literary value as devoid of intrinsic meaning. Instead she speaks of the “visibility” of a work of literature that can fluctuate in the course of time (10). Canonical value is referred to as “the product of the dynamics of a system” (15, emphasis in the original) and thus as utterly contingent, “an effect of multiple, continuously interacting variables” (30). 5 This seems even more peculiar as the eighteenth century was the time when similar debates began to flourish in Great Britain, a development that has been analyzed by various critics. 6 3 Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988), 10. In Britain, among other European countries, calls for the definition and establishment of aesthetic norms were made throughout the eighteenth century, and they were also acted upon. The appreciation of ‘good’ and valuable writing was not only theorized but also resulted very pragmatically in the writing of literary histories and literary biographies, such as those by Thomas Warton and Samuel Johnson. William Warburton’s 1747 edition of Shakespeare is often 4 Herrnstein Smith 52. 5 Even within the field of early American studies, some periods have received more attention in this respect than others. The Puritan period, i.e. the seventeenth century, for example, has for a long time been synonymous with ‘Early American,’ at the expense of eighteenth-century writing; see Carla Mulford, “What Is the Early American Canon, and Who Said It Needed Expanding? ,” Resources for American Literary Study 19.2 (1993): 165-73, 170. 6 See for example Jan Gorak, The Making of the Modern Canon: Genesis and Crisis of a Literary Idea (London: Athlone, 1991); Jonathan B. Kramnick, Making the English Canon: Print- Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700-1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998). Mobility and the Canon 179 turned to as an early example of how rules of evaluation were defined to establish binding norms and hierarchies of value in editing processes. 7 So what are the factors that complicate the American situation in the eighteenth century? One challenge which we encounter when dealing with the canon in the eighteenth century, no matter if it is America or Europe we are looking at, is a certain anachronism: the term canon, as referring to a set of secular texts, was only established in the second half of the eighteenth century. It was first used in secular terms as early as 1768 by the classicist David Ruhnken in his Historia Graecorum Oratorum, but the term was not used actively until the late nineteenth century. These developments point towards a tendency to appreciate and commemorate works of particular merit. 8 The OED lists the first secular use of the word in the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1885. 9 Interestingly, what used to count as a deficit has become a major asset and point of interest in the field of American studies. Several recent publications have stressed and explored the branch of transatlantic literary studies: critics such as Paul Giles, Eve Tavor Bannet and Susan Manning have made important contributions towards a sharper systematic and analytical understanding of what ‘transatlantic’ means in the context of literary studies, thereby shedding light on concepts such as Englishness in early American culture (Tennenhouse), transatlantic publication practices (Bannet) or women’s writing (Macpherson). But the main complicating factor is the deep transatlantic quality of early American literature. The close links that connected Britain and its colonies, respectively the young United States, not only in political and economic respects, but also with regard to its cultural production and identity have for a long time been blamed as a principal weakness: they were considered the main reason for a perceived lack of cultural autonomy and originality in literature and other forms of art. 10 7 Gorak 47-8. This ongoing interest in the transatlantic dimension of American literature reflects a more general shift away from concepts such as ‘national literature’ or ‘canon,’ whereby not only literary history is revised, but also traditional boundaries between disciplines are being eroded. Robert Crawford once put it succinctly in Devolving English Literature: “America was, from its beginning, not just a New World opening 8 Gorak 51. 9 G.A. Kennedy, “The Origin of the Concept of a Canon and Its Application to the Greek and Latin Classics,” Canon vs. Culture: Reflections on the Current Debate, ed. Jan Gorak (New York: Garland, 2001), 107. 10 Leonard Tennenhouse, The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750-1850 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007); Eve Tavor Bannet, Transatlantic Stories and the History of Reading, 1720-1810 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011); Heidi Macpherson, Transatlantic Women’s Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2008). J ULIA S TRAUB 180 before the passengers from the Mayflower; it was a cultural anthology [...].” 11 I would like to use this quotation as a point of departure because it suggests an interesting interplay between movement and stasis, mobility and fixity that is also characteristic of the development of an early American discourse concerned with the value of writing as of national importance and relevance. Early American writing - I am concerned in particular with the time span from 1770 to 1820 - should for the purpose of this essay be viewed in terms of a tapestry in which many different threads run together, some of which are of different provenance but similar enough to be merged. My main focus will be on the medium of periodical writing, the literary magazine in particular, which was a prominent platform for the expression of critical thought. Looking at examples which illustrate the emergence of an aesthetic discourse in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the young United States, I will show that there was a desire to make value permanent in the face of a literary production context that was, while increasingly rich, also experienced as accelerated and volatile. I thereby submit the notion of canonicity to a discussion which puts to the fore the dynamic between fixity and mobility as an important impetus for the creation of literary value. The period I am looking at provides a wonderful case study of how a longing for stability and permanence, i.e. the sturdy solidity that the term ‘canon’ may still suggest to some, is confronted with a volatility of publication practices that seem to have been at odds with, yet at the same time encouraged, processes of canon formation. * Many were the voices that denied US-Americans their own national literature, and such voices could be heard well into the nineteenth century. Most to the point was Sydney Smith’s devastating statement in the Edinburgh Review of December 1818, where he claimed that Americans did not have the privilege of a national literature at all: “Literature the Americans have none - no native literature we mean. It is all imported.” 12 In fact, in 1820, only some 30% of the books published in the US were by American writers. 13 11 Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000), 176. Certainly the establishment of a distinctly aesthetic American discourse or what we would call American literary criticism was slow and belated. Much of the period’s fictional or poetic writing appears uninspired and imitative. Samuel Miller, whose impressive - albeit unfinished - A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century from 1803 contains one of the first historical discussions of 12 Sydney Smith, “Travels in Canada and the United States, in 1816 and 1817, by Lieutenant Francis Hall,” Edinburgh Review 31.61 (1818): 132-50, 132. 13 J.P. Pritchard, Criticism in America: An Account of the Development of Critical Techniques from the Early Period of the Republic to the Middle Years of the Twentieth Century (Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1956), 10. Mobility and the Canon 181 American literature of the early period (as part of a chapter entitled “Nations Lately Become Literary”), detected one major reason: In the United States, the rewards of literature are small and uncertain. The people cannot afford to remunerate eminent talents or great acquirements. Booksellers, the great patrons of learning in modern times, are too poor to foster and reward the efforts of genius. 14 The development of authorship as a socially viable practice in the young United States was belated, leaving early America without author celebrities that would add some lustre to the literary landscape of the time. 15 Furthermore, the history of the legal protection of texts and authors’ rights in colonial America and later on in the United States is a long and vexed one. In Britain, modern copyright legislation begins with the Statute of Anne in 1710. In the United States, the first federal copyright law was only introduced in 1790, which, according to Sacvan Bercovitch, “made literature property and had therefore made authorship as a profession a possibility for American writers.” 16 From July 1818, we have another telling example taken from the North American Review, which develops this theme of a painfully experienced sense of inadequacy and immaturity: However, progress was not rapid: only few authors legally claimed their work as associations with commercial trade still appeared suspicious. Encompassing and effective legislation on an international scale was implemented only towards the end of the nineteenth century. This relatively late enforcement of copyright law did not only concern legal discourse and practice, but also directly affected the emergence of an American national literature. The pragmatic ramifications of these slow developments meant that the early American literary marketplace strongly relied on transatlantic importations of texts and books which were cheaper and readily available. The cumbersome development of copyright legislation in America fostered the notorious reprint culture in newspapers and magazines and explains the heavy reliance on the import of cheaper books from abroad. We make but a contemptible figure in the eyes of the world, and set ourselves up as objects of pity to our posterity, when we affect to rank the poets of our own 14 Samuel Miller, A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, vol. 2 (Bristol: Thoemmes, 2001), 406-07. 15 On the development of authorship in colonial and US-American writing, see William Charvat and Matthew J. Bruccoli, eds., The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800-1870 (New York: Columbia UP, 1992); Kenneth Dauber, The Idea of Authorship in America: Democratic Poetics from Franklin to Melville (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1990); Grantland S. Rice, The Transformation of Authorship in America (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997). 16 Sacvan Bercovitch, ed., The Cambridge History of American Literature: 1590-1820, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 14. J ULIA S TRAUB 182 country with those mighty masters of song who have flourished in Greece, Italy and Britain. 17 What is interesting here is that the nation’s standing as a cultural force is related to its literary legacy and the latter’s significance for future generations. This temporal arch that connects a mode of retrospection with instances of future-oriented projection is typical of any canonical project. The short excerpt nicely illustrates awareness of the fact that in order to leave a heritage from the past, work on a national literature ought to be done in the present. Further up in the same text, we find a textbook definition of what in canon studies is known as reflection theory: 18 “National gratitude - national pride - every high and generous feeling that attaches us to the land of our birth, or that exalts our characters as individuals, ask of us that we should foster the infant literature of our country [...].” 19 Hence the following example is maybe the more interesting as it provides a more complex case. The excerpt was written by Charles Brockden Brown, an important editor and novelist, and is taken from the American Register of January 1807, a publication which ran from 1806 to 1810 and meant to compile and thereby keep record, like a calendar, of the intellectual, political and scholarly activities that had taken place in the preceding year: Canon understood in such a way implies political and cultural distinctiveness, but also uniqueness of individual and collective ‘mentality’ that finds expression in works of literature. This also means that there are essential qualities that members of a certain group share and that are reflective of the group’s ‘character.’ This is of course an idea that is far removed from the way the canon is looked at in present-day discussions, where it is seen as constructed rather than given, fluid rather than carved in stone. English literature, beyond that of any other nation, may be represented as that of the whole world. The curiosity of that nation is such, that no work of general importance can make its appearance in any part of the civilized world without being speedily translated into English, and even the literature of our native country becomes English, by the republication of all important and valuable productions in Great Britain. 20 This passage begins with a description of the global impact of Anglophone writing, of what nowadays would probably be called ‘literatures in English,’ 17 Anon., “Art IX, An Essay on American Poetry,” North American Review and Miscellaneous Journal (1815-1821), 7.20 (1818): 198. 18 Sarah M. Corse, Nationalism and Literature: The Politics of Culture in Canada and the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), 13. 19 Anon., “Art IX, An Essay on American Poetry,” 198. 20 Charles Brockden Brown, “Review of Literature: General Catalogue and View of British Publications, for the Year 1806,” The American Register; or, General Repository of History, Politics and Science (1806-1810), January 1 (1807): 151. Mobility and the Canon 183 English being regarded as the world’s prime vernacular language. For a work to receive attention beyond its country of origin, so it is argued, it needs to be translated into English. The publication and distribution path of US- American books via Great Britain, it is argued, acts as an important gateway which facilitates the availability and accessibility of American texts on a global level. A good example to illustrate this phenomenon and to show that the publication detour via Britain did indeed catapult obscure American writers into the wider world is the period’s best-known and commercially most successful novel: Charlotte Temple by Susannah Rowson, a novel written by an American author, published for the first time in London in 1791 to then become a massive bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. 21 We are so intimately united with Great Britain in language, manners, law, religion, and commerce, that, in a literary point of view, we may justly be regarded as members of the same society, as a portion of the same people [...] and the whole annual produce of the British press being regularly transported to our shores, and furnishing almost the whole employment of our readers, British literature may truly be considered, so far as books are the property of their readers as well as of their writers, as likewise American. However, what I would like to highlight comes at the very end of this short excerpt. The value of certain American texts is asserted, which reflects awareness of how important it is to guarantee survival and persistence of what is ‘good’ American writing amidst this global circulation or flux of texts. ‘Valuable’ American books become English due to their republication in Great Britain, and this is not necessarily seen as a bad thing. This is a bi-directional movement, as we learn further on in the text: 22 There are a couple of points to be made. First, the understanding of ‘literature’ that is put forward here suggests that it meant ‘books’ rather than literary ‘works.’ In the absence of a clear understanding of what constituted literature in aesthetic terms, it is used to refer to material objects. Hence the author refers to literature when he mentions the produce of the British press as what accounts for the “literary point of view,” and when he talks about books as “property.” This is a point that I will take up again later. Equally striking is the reciprocal mobility that is referred to here, the fact that books are moved in two directions - in other words, a kind of bifocal mobility that makes British literature American and vice versa. While one would find it hard to argue for an evenly balanced reciprocity of literary commerce during the antebellum period, this passage contains a definition of transatlanticity in a nutshell, anticipating a phrasing such as Paul Giles’s, who reads British-American literature as revolving around “the more dis- 21 Susanna Rowson, Charlotte Temple, ed. Cathy N. Davidson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987). Its publisher in the United States was Mathew Carey, to whom I will return below. 22 Brown, “Review of Literature,” 151 (emphasis in the original). J ULIA S TRAUB 184 comfiting figures of mirroring and twinning, where mutual identities are not so much independently asserted but sacrilegiously travestied.” 23 Quite unlike the more traditional understanding of the canon as reflecting ‘given’ national identities, this excerpt shows the complex and contingent network of various factors involved in the assertion and mobilization of valuable pieces of writing. Far from the monolithic immutability often ascribed to notions of the canon, we are here dealing with processes of canon formation that suggest multiplicity, variety, the interplay of purely aesthetic concerns with material parameters and, last but not least, contingency. Passages such as the one quoted above remind us of how accidental the survival of some texts might have been - one may want to think of the hazards of transportation by sea - and that there is not always much consistency or system behind the solid surface of the canon. * The most seminal studies in early American literary history, coming from different angles, have emphasized the importance of language and its distribution for the building of an American nation in the decades following the Revolution and the early nineteenth century. Michael Warner’s study from 1990 entitled The Letters of the Republic saw print discourse as a “cultural matrix” and “printedness” as a key element involved in the formation of the United States. 24 In contrast, Christopher Looby, in Voicing America (1996), argued that language did matter, but that the United States owed their coming into being to “acts of voice,” stressing the “saliency [...] of vocal utterance as a deeply politically invested phenomenon of the social world.” 25 The bigger frame for any such constructivist approach has of course been provided by philosophers and political scientists such as Benedict Anderson and Cornelius Castoriadis, who, in the shape of the ‘imagined community’ and ‘society as an imaginary institution,’ developed theories of the nation and society that stress the importance of a collective imagination. 26 23 Paul Giles, Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2001), 2. These communal acts of the imagination allow individuals to perceive themselves as citizens pertaining to a unified entity that far transcends their immediate realm of experience and manages to install a sense of community and simultaneity. For Anderson, both the novel and the newspaper, two emanations of what he 24 Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth- Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990), xi. 25 Christopher Looby, Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996), 3. 26 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006); Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). Mobility and the Canon 185 terms “print-capitalism,” 27 act as such palpable agents involved in processes of creating cohesion that are extremely abstract. The role of newspapers and the novel is to set up a “specific imagined world of vernacular readers,” which is based on the idea of “steady, solid simultaneity through time.” 28 The relevance of Anderson’s work for a discussion of the early American Republic has been called into question. Trish Loughran, in her 2007 study on early American print culture entitled The Republic in Print, criticized Anderson’s work on the imagined community as far too optimistic, stressing the importance of regional developments and the progress of interregional connections that were much more of a reality than the large-scale notion of a nation which, at least in Anderson’s work, tends to ignore “geographical diversity” as a complicating factor. 29 For Loughran, the localness of early print culture enabled the founding of the United States, but it was only later, once regions started to interconnect, by tourism or the interregional exportation of print products, that Americans felt as members of a nation. 30 Central to early American print culture was periodical publishing, but given the overall difficulty of defining the implication of literature in processes of nation-building, a lot of work still needs to be done to reach a better understanding of the role that periodicals - i.e. newspapers, magazines, reviews, almanacs played in the formation of the nation and a national identity. Newspapers, which frequently contained poems and other literary forms of writing, existed in North America as of the early eighteenth century, often drawing upon the famous British models such as The Tatler and The Spectator; American magazines existed as of 1741, the year which saw the publication of the American Magazine and the General Magazine under Andrew Bradford and Benjamin Franklin respectively. In the course of the century, magazine culture became quite a phenomenon: twenty-seven new magazines began publication from 1775 to 1795, a trend that persisted in the nineteenth century. 31 Magazines were often compared to repositories or museums: they not only contained original pieces of writing but also reprinted material that was taken from newspapers or other magazines, of European (predominantly British) and American provenance. In the Monthly Magazine (edited by As with the newspapers, the models that inspired The United States Magazine and The Royal American Magazine or later on The American Museum, The Columbian Magazine or the Massachusetts Magazine were British. 27 Anderson 43. 28 Anderson 63. 29 Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770-1870 (New York: Columbia UP, 2007), 13. 30 Loughran xix-xx. 31 William J. Free, The Columbian Magazine and American Literary Nationalism (The Hague: Mouton, 1968), 12. J ULIA S TRAUB 186 Charles Brockden Brown) of April 1800, the following comparison was made, which resembles many other descriptions of magazines at that time: A Magazine ought literally to be a shop where stuffs of all conceivable or vendible kinds, where hemp from Russia, linen from Connaught, leather from Tunis, cotten [sic] from Hoquang, and silk from Aleppo, should be offered for sale, wrought into all textures, dyed of all colours, and cut into all shapes. 32 And in the Introduction to the United States Magazine, the editor, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, neatly sums up the function of a literary magazine as follows: “Magazines are greatly useful as repositories of a thousand valuable smaller pieces that otherwise would never see the light, but lie concealed amongst the papers of the ingenious.” 33 These and similar metaphors - the library, the store, the museum - imply that magazines were seen as storage space. Their self-proclaimed job was to take care of ‘fugitive’ material often previously published elsewhere, in foreign publications or American newspapers, and to mobilize this material at the same time by circulating it. The material that went into these magazines was extremely diverse and covered a variety of forms and genres. Faced with such a wealth of material, one should remain alert to the fact that much of these publications was ‘on loan’: material that was circulated, reprinted and appropriated at a time when copyright laws were relatively lax and when the pressures of the increasingly commercialized publishing industry began to take hold. 34 In this context, the following figure is impressive: three quarters of the material included in American magazines in the years 1741-1794 were drawn from other publications. 35 Furthermore, these magazines, even though they were often introduced to their readership as national institutions of the future, were short-lived. On average, they lasted for fourteen months, and owed their ephemeral character to the dispersion of their readership and distribution difficulties. 36 Periodicals were a cultural force because they enabled the circulation and mobilization of news, texts and, more generally speaking, information. Rich as the varieties of fictional and non-fictional writing that they contained may have been, they also made it hard and still make it hard for us to envision and define a cohesive corpus of American writing. Yet it is both entertaining 32 Anon., “A Literary Ware-House,” The Monthly Magazine, and American Review (1799- 1800), 2.4 (1800): 253. 33 Hugh Henry Brackenridge, “Introduction,” United States Magazine; a Repository of History, Politics and Literature (1779-1779), 1 (1779): 9. 34 On the development of the American print market in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries see James Raven, “The Importation of Books in the Eighteenth Century,” The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, ed. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge UP), 183-98. 35 Free 48. 36 Michael Gilmore, “Magazines, Criticism, and Essays,” The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 1, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 560. Mobility and the Canon 187 and instructive to look into editorials, prefaces and announcements exactly because they usually did insist on their own prosperous future. Thus, in the inaugural edition of the United States Magazine of January 1779, the new periodical is advertised as a publication that will “in itself contain a library, and be the literary coffee-house of public conversation” and that “will select from late and curious publications.” 37 The ambition of this new publication, it is obvious, is twofold: the magazine is meant to evaluate, to select and preserve works that are outstanding - what I would argue are the essential processes of canon formation - but it also aims to mark its own position within the public sphere, the realm of polite culture and public discourse. In addition to being important news channels, periodicals were instructive, often preoccupied with matters of taste and refinement, and thus important agents in the formation of an American civil society. Subsequently, the task of a good magazine was defined in the April 1790 edition of the New York Magazine as the following: “A well conducted Magazine, we conceive must, from its nature, contribute greatly to diffuse knowledge throughout a community, and to create in that community a taste for literature [...].” 38 It has been said that Magazines are oftentimes preventive of the acquirement of more solid literature, because that while they make the path to knowledge easy, it is more swiftly travelled over, and cannot be so accurately examined, as when the student is reduced to plod upon it through a tract of long and heavy reading of the authors, that are found in libraries. But suppose it may be true that we are likely to become more deep and solid scholars by reading systematic writers, and diving deeply to the fountain head of classic information, yet this is not to be obtained by every one, and is it not more eligible that the greater part be moderately instructed, than that a few should be unrivalled in the commonwealth of letters, and all the world besides, a groupe of ignorant and brainless persons? However, the ephemeral character of much writing included in these magazines was perceived as a problem - one could argue that the material they aimed to assemble was at times too mobile for their own good. This is from Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s introduction to the United States Magazine again: 39 Periodical publishing, characterized by its reliance on abbreviated forms of writing, this passage suggests, becomes the handmaid for an essentially utilitarian approach to learning: greater education for a greater number of people. This excerpt suggests that the information flow became increasingly dense and hard to manage. A very similar point was made by Joseph Dennie, an important journalist and editor of a literary magazine called The Port-Folio, in an early essay series called “The Farrago,” dating from 1792: he refers to 37 Brackenridge 9. 38 Anon., “Introductory Essay,” The New York Magazine, or Literary Repository (1790-1797) 1.4 (1790): 195. 39 Brackenridge 9. J ULIA S TRAUB 188 the essay as the most suitable form for middle-class readers who do not have the time to read lengthy books. 40 The American Register edition of January 1807, which I already looked at above, contains an overview or “sketch” of American writing from the years 1806-07 written by Charles Brockden Brown. Predictably enough, the superiority of European countries in terms of literary production is mentioned, while the US-American situation is seen as ambiguous: “A vast number of pens is constantly busy,” it is argued; however, “circumstances oblige them or incline them to be satisfied with brief essays, in daily newspapers and gazettes.” The improved digestibility of periodical writing coupled with its expanded geographical and demographic reach exerts a democratizing effect. Magazines and newspapers may well lead to a truncation of written thought; however, they also ensure large-scale reading, reaching a wider readership and thus leading to a quantitative improvement of reading as a practice important for the nation and its citizens. 41 [...] the American states are, in a literary view, no more than a province of the British empire. In these respects we bear an exact resemblance to Scotland and Ireland. [...] Books flow in upon us from the great manufactory of London, in the same manner as they make their way to Bristol, York, Edinburgh, and Dublin. As the inhabitants of these cities get their books from London, their cloths from Manchester, and their hardware from Birmingham, so do those of Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, and the importation and consumption in all these articles is such in the American towns, as to place them by no means in a rank below that of the British provincial capitals, in refinement, luxury, and knowledge. There is no lack of originality, nor is there a shortage of writers in early nineteenth-century America. Rather the media at hand, short-lived periodicals, force writers to adapt their writing in terms of scope and ambition. As a consequence, 42 As regards the realm of literature, the author argues, America is just a province. One should note that in this excerpt ‘literature’ is again used in the sense of ‘books,’ books that are sent off to the peripheries of the British cultural empire, along with cloth, steel and iron. Literature is thus essentially a mobile commodity, involved in a vast transatlantic commercial endeavour. As Ian K. Steele has shown, the British empire produced networks of communication that did not only help to promote commerce, trade and administration, but it also allowed scholars, scientists and intellectuals to connect with each other or at least to disseminate their work. 43 40 Angela Vietto, Women and Authorship in Revolutionary America: Women and Gender in the Early Modern World (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 42. Michael Warner has 41 Charles Brockden Brown, “A Sketch of American Literature for 1806-7,” The American Register; or, General Repository of History, Politics and Science (1806-1810), 1 (1807): 173. 42 Brown, “A Sketch of American Literature for 1806-7,” 173. 43 Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675-1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986). Mobility and the Canon 189 examined the nationalist rhetoric that informed “any and all stages of bookmaking,” suggesting that the aesthetic dimension of books, and by implication the specifically American aesthetic qualities of a book, were left undefined, ‘American’ connoting the “value of nationality” rather than the features of polite literature. 44 ‘Literature’ meant something else to the eighteenth-century reader than it does today. 45 No wonder then that, as the following excerpt suggests, there was a growing desire to systematize and immobilize this circulation of goods. Here is another example from the Monthly Anthology of January 1808, which outlines the aims of the magazine: The aesthetic implications that inform an intuitive modern understanding of literature as in ‘belles lettres’ were still to be defined in the eighteenth century, resulting in a gradual refinement and narrowing of the term. Under this head we propose to commence a review of books in American literature, which have either been forgotten, or have not hitherto received the attention they deserve. Interested as we are in every thing, which relates to the honour of our country, we are not ashamed to express our conviction, that one reason of the low estimation, in which our literature is held among ourselves as well as in Europe is, that there has yet been no regular survey of this field of letters. 46 The author’s hope is that there are a few rare works that will “awaken at least the regard of some future historian of literature,” 47 This desire for sustainability at a time when writing was felt to be shortlived also fostered the development of another important canon-building tool, the literary anthology. A remarkable number of literary collections, miscellanies and anthologies, song books and verse collections were published in Britain during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. a statement which stresses a desire for the sustainability and durability of texts under the assumption that a connoisseur will, in the future, be able to reappraise the beauty and value of these texts. It seems paradoxical that this call for permanence should appear in such an ephemeral medium. 48 44 Warner 121. Miscellanies brought together entire pieces (mainly poems) but also snippets of texts 45 Trevor Ross, “The Emergence of ‘Literature’: Making and Reading the English Canon in the Eighteenth Century,” ELH 63.2 (1996): 397-422. 46 Anon., “Retrospective Notices of American Literature,” The Monthly Anthology, and Boston Review Containing Sketches and Reports of Philosophy, Religion, History, Arts and Manners (1803-1811), 5.1 (1808): 54. 47 Anon., “Retrospective Notices of American Literature,” 54. 48 For a discussion of the anthology as a literary genre, see Anne Ferry, Tradition and the Individual Poem: An Inquiry Into Anthologies (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001). See G. Watson, ed., The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1971) for an impressive listing of different kinds of miscellanies published in Britain between 1600 and 1800. J ULIA S TRAUB 190 that could be easily detached from their context without losing their appeal, and they had been extremely popular in London since the Restoration. They agreed with the booksellers’ need to market their products, but also pleased a new readership with little time and/ or little money keen to get their share of reading. 49 In America the first literary anthology was published around 1744/ 45, an anonymous work which is noteworthy for its inclusion of several poems by Mather Byles and was called Poems by Several Hands. 50 The next and more important anthologies appeared only towards the end of the century: Mathew Carey’s Beauties of Poetry, British and American (1791), the first American collection of ‘beauties,’ and The Columbian Muse (1794), and Elihu Hubbard Smith’s American Poems, Selected and Original (1793). 51 Mathew Carey’s The Beauties of Poetry, British and American contained 244 pages and brought together poems by both British and American poets. As Carey put it in the advertisement to his volume, he hoped to provide an “elegant fund of rational and innocent entertainment” and to thereby “enlarge the understanding, and refine the heart,” a rather common declaration of intention at this time, when the dulce et utile theme was often embedded in a discourse of politeness, taste and refinement. By including “copious extracts from the most celebrated American bards,” he aimed to make his work “more acceptable” to American readers. 52 49 Barbara M. Benedict, “The ‘Beauties’ of Literature, 1750-1820: Tasteful Prose and Fine Rhyme for Private Consumption,” 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, ed. Kevin L. Cope (New York: AMS), 316-46. Three years later, Carey published a second anthology, The Columbian Muse, and there decided to do entirely without British poems and to focus instead on the work of, as it says on the title page, “various authors of established reputation.” Carey (1760-1839) was an Irishman who worked as a printer (also for Benjamin Franklin, whom he met in Paris), published several magazines, among which was the Columbian Magazine mentioned above, wrote a number of books, some of them political economy, and worked as a bookseller. He was a man of many talents, but what is most intriguing about him is his persistent interest, throughout his career, in the selection, preservation and circulation of value. This makes him a particularly interesting literary figure of his time in that his biography and work create a conflux where the interest in value becomes explicitly prag- 50 Anon., A Collection of Poems: By Several Hands (Boston: Green and Gookin, 1744). 51 Mathew Carey, ed., Beauties of Poetry, British and American (Philadelphia: M. Carey, 1791) and The Columbian Muse: A Selection of American Poetry, from Various Authors of Established Reputation (New York: M. Carey, 1794); Elihu Hubbard Smith, ed., American Poems: Selected and Original (Litchfield: Collier and Buel, 1793). A relatively brief overview of eighteenth-century American poetry anthologies is given by Alan Golding, From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1995), 5. 52 Carey, Beauties, n.p. Mobility and the Canon 191 matic, but is also made to serve a larger design of building a cultural memory for the nation. The other outstanding editor figure was Elihu Hubbard Smith (1771- 1798), who had grown up in Connecticut, went to Yale, studied medicine and moved to New York City, where he practised as a physician and joined the city’s famous Friendly Club, before he died of yellow fever. He wrote a variety of texts, among them not only poetry and essays, but also a libretto, insightful diaries and a utopia. His anthology from 1793, published in Litchfield, Connecticut, was meant to preserve texts that had previously appeared in magazines and was the first anthology of American poetry to be published. 65 poems were included by poets such as Joel Barlow, Timothy Dwight and John Trumbull. Their overall style was “neo-classical and conservative, quite closely modelled after the British masters (primarily Pope).” 53 Still, this anthology can be seen as “a splendid landmark,” a document that offers insight into US-American civilization in the years around 1790. 54 When looking round them, they [the publisher] saw many Poems, written by the most eminent American Authors, from the loose manner of their publishment, known only to a few of their particular acquaintance, and unheard of by the generality of their Countrymen. The value of the performances, and the regard which authors generally feel for their literary offspring, left them no room to doubt, but that, at some future period, each person would think it not unworthy the while to collect what he had scattered. It is worth looking at the Preface that Smith wrote for American Poems, Selected and Original as it allows us to see how strongly concerned pivotal figures like him were with the building of a canon: 55 Performances of this kind, falling from the pens of persons not intent on literary fame; or intent on reputation; or whole names have not yet been dignified by national applause; especially as many of them are adapted to particular and local occasions; notwithstanding their desert, are constantly liable to be forgotten and lost. [...] Among other things, it did not appear to be a matter altogether destitute of usefulness, to bring together, in one view, the several poetical productions of the different States. 56 Smith mentions that the “loose manner” of periodical publishing is the reason for its inefficiency: periodicals simply fail to reach the kind of broad readership that they would ideally target. Inscribed into this passage is the fear of losing valuable material and the resulting desire to make a conscious effort at preserving what is thought of as precious. Later on in the same pref- 53 William K. Bottorff, “Introduction,” American Poems by Elihu Hubbard Smith, ed. William K. Bottorff (Gainesville: Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints, 1966), viii. 54 Bottorff xviii. 55 Elihu Hubbard Smith, “Preface,” American Poems iii. 56 “Preface,” American Poems iv. J ULIA S TRAUB 192 ace, Smith repeats this anxiety towards mobile, fugitive media when he mentions “the frail security of an obscure newspaper,” which for a long time “was the only one they had for some of the handsomest specimens of American Poetry.” 57 His anthologizing project aims to create endurance, to establish a stable storage medium that will outlast the vicissitudes of time and fixate valuable pieces of writing for the future, “[t]o afford a stronger, and more durable security, is one of the objects of this Publication.” 58 A closer look at book history in colonial America and the young United States alerts us to the randomness and contingency to which we owe the survival of certain texts - to the exclusion of others. Contingency, if we are to follow Stephen Greenblatt’s recent work, lies at the heart of cultural mobility because it challenges grand narratives (of the nation, of collective identity, of civilization) by defying their teleological implications. His concern is with ‘value’: what Smith is saying is that the writing of good literature deserves shared appreciation and this appreciation is reflected in any kind of endeavour aimed at preserving literary texts otherwise likely to get lost. Outward manifestations of appreciation are important for the formation of a national identity. His anticipation of the reaction of future generations and their reception of these works confirms the underlying tenor of nascent literary self-reflection in terms of national feeling. 59 57 Ibid. While providing a historical view of the development of American literary history and its institutions of evaluation, the principal aim of this essay was to suggest that the interest in mobility that is reflected in current literary debates ought to target also those aspects of the discipline of literary studies that represent quite the opposite - stability, consensus, permanence - and to thereby begin to appreciate a ‘contingent’ approach to literary history or the canon as a source for fresh perspectives. 58 Ibid. 59 Stephen Greenblatt, “Cultural Mobility: An Introduction,” Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010), 16. Mobility and the Canon 193 Works Cited Anon. A Collection of Poems By Several Hands. Boston: Green and Gookin, 1744. Anon. “Introductory Essay.” The New York Magazine, or Literary Repository (1790-1797) 1.4 (1790): 195. Anon. “A Literary Ware-House.” The Monthly Magazine, and American Review (1799- 1800) 2.4 (1800): 253. 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