Last week brought a wonderful volume that I've been eagerly awaiting all summer: Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors' A New Literary History of America. The book has about 250 essays on American literary history -- organized around dates (like 1692, the year of the Salem Witchraft Trials, March 6, 1865, the date of Lincoln's Second Inaugural, Memorial Day, 1897, the date of the monument to the Massachusetts' 54th Regiment is dedicated at the Boston Garden, October 1965, the autobiography of Malcom X appears). The New Literary History has entries on a lot of what we commonly think of as American literature, like entries on John Withinthrop, Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson (though her captivity narrative is spoken of in connection with the Alien and Sedition Acts), Ralph Waldo Emerson's American Scholar (which I recently learned was delivered in the First Unitarian Church in Cambrdige, not on the Harvard campus) and his Divinity School Address, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the usual suspects in the twentieth century, like Tennessee Williams, Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ralph Ellison.... Well, the list goes on and on. You can see the full table of contents here, at the book's website, newliteraryhistory.com. (And there's an entry on one of my favorite figures in American literature, Francis Daniel Pastorius; more of my thoughts on Pastorius here.)
But what's most interesting to me is the new things that are in here -- one of my favorite essays (no surprise here) is Alan Wallach's on landscape painter Thomas Cole. Wallach talks about one of Cole's paintings, Lake with Dead Trees, which I haven't studied. I'm not quite sure how it fits with my theme of property and progress. Some of the other creative ideas in here are entries on the Cherokee cases, the Missouri Compromise, and the meeting between Albert C. Barnes -- the famous art collector (we talk about him in trusts and estates a bunch) and John Dewey. Never know what things you'll learn about in these thousand pages.
And speaking of progress, this book is a quintessentially American and optimsitic. The dates selected here are generally forward-looking ones--not much of proslavery thought, for instance, in here. This book, like other companions to American thought -- like the fabulous Fox and Kloppenberg Companion to American Thought--is necessarily selective. But it's going to repay many, many readings. And its structure and its sparks of creativity will set the research agenda for many years. American literary history looks very different today than it did even last month. If you're looking for a great and creative gift this is it -- or if you're interested in some great reads, get a copy for yourself. It's the best fifty bucks you'll spend this year.
It inspires me to think about a New Legal History of America, which would be organized around dates, too.
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