In the aftermath of America's centennial celebrations of 1876,
readers developed an appetite for chronicles of the nation's past.
Born amid this national vogue, the field of American literary
history was touted as the balm for numerous "ills--from burgeoning
immigration to American anti-intellectualism to demanding
university administrators--and enjoyed immense popularity between
1880 and 1910.
In the first major analysis of the field's early decades, Claudia
Stokes offers important insights into the practices, beliefs, and
values that shaped the emerging discipline and have continued to
shape it for the last century. She considers particular
personalities--including Thomas Wentworth Higginson, William Dean
Howells, Brander Matthews, and Mark Twain--and episodes that had a
formative effect on American literary history as a discipline.
Reexamining the field's deep attachment to the literature of
antebellum New England, the periodization of the nineteenth
century, and the omission of Native narratives, Stokes reveals the
many forces, both inside and outside the academy, that propelled
the rise of American literary history and persist as influences on
the work of current practitioners of the field.