1
This text is published in New Directions in the History of the Novel, ed. Patrick Parrinder, Andrew Nash, and Nicola Wilson. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 165-­‐76
Defining an ‘Age of the Novel’ in the United States
Jonathan Arac, University of Pittsburgh
The term literature began to consolidate its modern meaning around 1830, just as print
culture was becoming immensely more powerful.1 Ever since that time, the novel has
taken up more and more space within literature, but since the early twentieth century,
literature has become increasingly less important within culture as a whole, as new
media, including film, radio, television, and the e-world have rapidly emerged and risen
to dominance.2
This is the larger field of inquiry. My particular target is the history of the novel
in the United States. My hypothesis is this: in the US there was an ‘Age of the Novel’,
extending approximately from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries – call it
1850-1960. In this period, the novel emerged as a major cultural player, achieved
considerable dominance, and then its role began to diminish. To frame this age – this
century between two centuries – requires quite intricate work extending a long way back
historically and then coming up to the present. In this piece, it touches, besides the US,
national literatures of the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Germany, and elsewhere.
Sociologically, my main focus is institutional continuity.3 I gauge this continuity
by two rough measures: first the possibility for a novelist to have a career as a novelist
(well into the nineteenth century, important early American novels are, at best, small
2
parts of much larger careers devoted elsewhere), and second the extent to which novels
locate themselves – whether positively or negatively – within a discursive field including
other novels.4 Within that institutional continuity, I rely for further bearings on Raymond
Williams’s categories of emergent, dominant, residual, and alternative.5
The novel exists within a larger media history—most immediately that of print,
but also the yet more extensive history of script that encompasses print. The pressure of
the world we live in now makes it possible to conceive a recently past ‘Age of the
Novel’. I emphasize especially the current emergence of world music, circulating across
nations, reaching audiences who do not understand the language of lyrics, by various
digital means: this music’s effect that greatly outspeeds and overreaches the world
literature of our day.6 Music moves almost as fast as capital, but print now moves far
more slowly, unlike the great days of literature when it shared a print basis with capital.
Music communicates by rhythm in ways very different from the way script
communicates by reading. Our world culture today gives new powers to the ear – a neoauralization. With this perspective, we can give nuanced contour to the history of novel
as print.
I underline the presentism of my undertaking.7 I do not believe a knowledge that
excludes the present affords a truer representation than one that acknowledges the
urgency of the present. The more interesting a historicist (as opposed to presentist)
account becomes, the more likely it is to be covertly, unacknowledgedly, or even
unconsciously shaped by the historian’s present.
Questions of speed and extent, the diverse measures of times and spaces
complicate the large story. This is one reason that I register this large context, but
3
confine my actual project to focus on a single nation. But first, some more of the larger
history. We know that it took a long time to get from the Western discovery of print to
the moment that politics, religion, economics, and technology came together to make
possible both mass literacy and mass circulation. From the sixteenth century into the
nineteenth, it kept seeming to have happened until finally it did, at least in the West. The
novel continues in the twenty-first century as part of world literature because of the
uneven developments that mean some language and culture groups have achieved this
mass breakthrough at different times. Here I draw from Franco Moretti’s theorization of
the novel as world literature, modelled through core and periphery.8 So, in the 1960s the
Latin American ‘Boom’ with its world-renowned One Hundred Years of Solitude, in the
1980s the visibility of South Asian writing in English with its world-renowned
Midnight’s Children, and more recently Orhan Pamuk as a Turkish writer who in
translation compels the world. Pascale Casanova’s World Republic of Letters helps in
analysing this issue of cultural authority, as newly accruing to works that had not
previously captured the world’s attention.9
The novel in the twenty-first century has not disappeared, but it is no longer
dominant. In the United States, both within the ‘Age of the Novel’ and in the years since,
the form extended itself through appropriations of its powers. Populations understood
previously to have been shut out from the world of literature wielded the novel. A
national model of internal core-and-periphery still does a lot of work – for example,
Theodore Dreiser in the early twentieth century as a Catholic in Protestant America,
raised in a German-speaking family in Anglophone America; Richard Wright and Ralph
Ellison in the mid-twentieth century as African Americans; Saul Bellow in the 1950s and
4
60s as a Jewish immigrant; in the 70s and 80s, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison as
African American women and Maxine Hong Kingston as Asian American; the recent
impact of work by the New Jersey/Dominican Junot Diaz. What do we make of the
pattern by which, since the 1950s, as television became the dominant medium, authority
in the novel was seized by members of marginal groups?
So this is the big picture. Now for some closer attention to the double process in
which a new sphere of literature emerged, and within it the institution of the novel. I start
with Shakespeare. It is amazing that an English writer of playscripts, an actor and
theatrical entrepreneur, became, centuries after he lived, an international model for what
it means to be an author as a creative genius. This later critical transformation of the
figure of Shakespeare, moving him from the stage to the page, underwrites the modern
Western idea of literature.10 The print monument of the first folio made this possible,
after the folio was intellectually reprocessed into the scripture on which literature is
founded, starting in the eighteenth century and running into the nineteenth. Shakespeare
was canonized, nationalized, and universalized, as part of various larger cultural struggles
for authority. I’ll call this whole process the Battle between Ancients and Moderns,
adapting for a wider time and space of debate the name given to a specific late
seventeenth century controversy that occurred in England and France.11 Print produced
fixed texts, and the heroic editorial scholarship that this in turn enabled made the
Ancients definitively distant in a way that, so far as we can understand, had not held for
medieval culture.
Something of this dynamic may be seen in so foundational a novel as Don
Quixote. Even though the novel cites the authority of Aristotle, the big work that the
5
Quixote does is to distinguish between a past age and the present. Cervantes’s book
makes value reside in the present as true, while the books that come from the past – the
print versions of medieval romance that drive Quixote mad – have no connection to
actual life. Print itself has no authority: Part Two, famously, takes Quixote to a printshop that is producing copies of the spurious sequel to his adventures. We open here a
vertiginous dialectic of modernity that I must turn from, with perhaps only an allusion to
Borges’s ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’. In linking Shakespeare and Cervantes
as I have just done, I’m encroaching on the Romantic formulation of literature by
Friedrich Schlegel, but I’m not quite ready to be there yet.
Consider first the great English writer Samuel Johnson, who maps onto American
culture in relation to his slightly older contemporaries Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan
Edwards. Johnson’s own productions show him as a man of letters active in diverse
genres: poetic imitations of Juvenal’s satires, most notably in The Vanity of Human
Wishes; a tragedy, Irene; prose fiction in the form of an Oriental moral fable, Rasselas;
periodical literature in the Rambler. He won his greatest fame in his own age as a
scholar: he compiled the first important dictionary of the English language. My concern
is with his work as a critic. Despite Johnson’s reputation as a classicist, his critical
writing shows him ready to praise work of the present and recent past, moderns equal to
ancients.
The distribution of attention in Johnson’s critical work shows that the novel had
as yet a tiny place in the overall cultural system. His biggest body of critical writing is
Lives of the Poets, biocritical introductions to English poets of the previous 150 years.
This is what publishers commissioned from him. Despite his strong disagreement with
6
John Milton’s politics and religion, and despite his stunning put-down of Paradise Lost,
that no reader ‘ever wished it longer’, Johnson places Milton’s powers of invention and
execution second only to Homer’s.12 Johnson did a major edition of Shakespeare. Some
of his judgments seem to make no sense on our side of the nineteenth-century cultural
transformation: he thought Shakespeare wrote easily and naturally in his comedies, while
his tragedies appear too forced. Yet he places Shakespeare at the level of Homer also.
Contemporary prose fiction receives memorable treatment from Johnson only in one brief
periodical essay, Rambler 4; and we might also add Rambler 60, on biography, which
actually states principles of perspective, attention, and composition highly relevant to
what became the practice of novelistic realism. Both of these genres, novel and
biography, were still moving towards their times of flourishing. Johnson saw the future
when he recognized that representing the lives of unremarkable people might produce
great writing.
For Johnson, literature still covered the whole ground of learned production in
writing.13 The term had not yet taken on the primary meaning it gained in the nineteenth
century, namely, imaginative belles letters, especially poetry, prose fiction, and drama.
(This meaning in American bookstores today has further restricted itself: The shelves
labelled ‘literature’ contain novels, segregated from poems and plays; more particularly,
novels socially defined as serious, as opposed to fictional prose narratives defined as
romance, gothic, science fiction, crime, horror, western.) For Johnson, Shakespeare was
great, but he could be criticized by standards available to any person of education and
taste. There was no sense that Shakespeare’s works held depths requiring special gifts to
discover or expound.
7
For Johnson's younger contemporary, the great German writer Goethe, it was
quite different. Goethe’s early experience of Shakespeare was a revelation, which he
describes in language comparable to that of religious conversion, and his early Goetz von
Berlichingen is modelled on Shakespeare’s history plays. Like Johnson, Goethe wrote
across genres, and a lot better than Johnson for the most part. Besides his large and
outstanding body of lyric poetry, Goethe was of course an extremely important dramatist,
including Faust. He is also, I would say, the greatest novelist who would be just as great
a writer if he had never written a novel.
In founding the key novelistic subgenre of the Bildungsroman with Wilhelm
Meisters Lehrjahre, Goethe built the novel around Wilhelm’s encounter with Hamlet.
Wilhelm first defines the play as containing a mystery, and then he constructs an
interpretation to solve it. This process forms a major part of the protagonist’s own
spiritual, psychological development. The most brilliant critical intelligence in the
generation younger than Goethe, Friedrich Schlegel, wrote a review-essay on Wilhelm
Meister that one could say invents Romantic criticism – the theorizations that made
literature as we have known it for the past two hundred years. August Wilhelm Schlegel
carried his brother’s work forward through his translations of seventeen plays, which
made Shakespeare part of German culture and formed the basis for Schlegel's
theorization of ‘organic form’ in his lectures on world drama, in which Shakespeare
appears as the equal of Sophocles.
The greater Shakespeare becomes, as a modern, the greater becomes Goethe, or
any other modern who can appropriate Shakespeare for his own purposes. So,
paradoxically, even perversely, the greater Shakespeare, the greater the novel. The
8
notions of authorship, genius, development, psychology, and individuality that are
constructed as part of the praise of Shakespeare become available for analysis and
description of a whole new body of writing, along with the notion of the ‘world’ of a
writer’s imagination. These resources helped to make possible the novel in its emergent
age.
One more aspect of Goethe’s work plays an important role in my story: the idea
of ‘World Literature’. In the last years of Goethe’s life, he discussed ‘world literature’ in
several different contexts: his encounter with Persian poetry, his interest in the new
journals of literary opinion circulating across Europe, and his engagement with Thomas
Carlyle, the young Scottish biographer of Friedrich Schiller and translator of Wilhelm
Meister.14
With Carlyle, Americanists can feel almost at home. His essays in the Edinburgh
Review helped to inspire Ralph Waldo Emerson. When Emerson went abroad, he made it
a point to meet Carlyle, and Emerson arranged for book publication in the US of
Carlyle’s remarkable para-novel Sartor Resartus before it found any publisher in the UK.
Carlyle’s chapter on Shakespeare in his Heroes and Hero-Worship placed ‘the hero as
poet’ in a line that began with divinity and prophecy and that ended in the present with
‘the hero as man of letters’ – Samuel Johnson, but also Goethe. Carlyle laments that
Goethe was still too little known in Britain to make him available for extended public
discourse. A few years later, the British intellectual George Henry Lewes set about to
end the ignorance by writing a major biography of Goethe for the English-speaking
world, and on his research trip to Weimar, he brought with him his lover Marian Evans,
soon to become George Eliot. Carlyle’s narratological experimentation in Sartor
9
Resartus helped Melville figure out how to operate with Ishmael in Moby-Dick, and there
is an even more important connection.
Carlyle’s analysis of Shakespeare and of the modern writer in Heroes and HeroWorship provided figures of thought by which Melville, while he was in the midst of
writing Moby-Dick, grasped what so moved him in his encounter with the writing of
Nathaniel Hawthorne. Melville works this out in his essay ‘Hawthorne and His Mosses’.
This bears comparison with Schlegel’s review-essay on Wilhelm Meister. In both essays
a brilliant young writer takes a huge step forward in his way of thinking about the writing
that he aims henceforth to accomplish, and he takes that step by recognizing in a
contemporary writer of prose fiction powers of mind, soul, imagination that measure on
the same scale as those of Shakespeare.15
Even many years later, the same Shakespearean measure of value operates in
Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Woolf praises Shakespeare for his greatness of
mind, in contrast to the myopic closure with which men usually have written about
women. He knew ‘no obstacle’ in Antony and Cleopatra, his mind was ‘incandescent’
and ‘unimpeded’.16 In the next chapter, Woolf praises Jane Austen in the same terms:
‘the minds of both had consumed all impediments’. A recent female novelist may
achieve the same power as did an older male poet. In Schlegel and Melville and Woolf,
there is the same contrast of era and genre, but for the men no question of gender, but
rather of nationality. For Schlegel, Goethe as a German writer, and for Melville,
Hawthorne as an American writer, in each case working in an emergent national
literature, may equal Shakespeare, a figure whose greatness defines what is for each of
them one of the few recognized major national literatures, that of England. Moreover, for
10
all three the cultural authority of tragedy, accrued in the West since the Greeks and
greatly reinforced since the Renaissance, transfers to writers in the modern genre of the
novel.
In discussing Moby-Dick I’ve got a little ahead of myself. Bear with me, while I
return to around 1830. These years in which Goethe was formulating his thoughts on
world literature are also when the novel in the West begins to become an effective
institution. In the famous paragraph about world literature in the Communist Manifesto,
Marx and Engels do not mention the novel, but it is the genre for which their
formulations would hold truest. At last, print culture had gained the power and
confidence to affirm itself fully. In Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris, set in 1482, he
devotes a whole chapter to what we would regard as proto-McLuhanite formulations
about the various media and their powers and fortunes. It’s summed up in a slogan:
‘This will kill that’.17 Through the power of print the book will usurp the educational
functions that architecture had long exercised. Hugo’s writing of such a novel testified to
the power of Walter Scott’s work, which had made the Middle Ages sexy.
In 1830 Walter Scott was near the end of the fifteen years in which his
‘Waverley’ novels started to redefine the project of prose fiction. Scott’s earliest signed
publication was a translation of Goethe’s Goetz von Berlichingen (1799). That is, the
Scottish inventor of modern historical romance in prose was inspired by the historical
drama a German learned to write from Shakespeare. But first it took him to a career in
verse, before he got to prose fiction.
In the process that Georg Lukács powerfully articulates in The Historical Novel,
Scott’s work not only launched a vogue for historical fictions. More importantly, his
11
work taught others to see the present through eyes shaped by history.18 The original
subtitle for Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir was ‘Chronicle of 1830’, treating last year as if
it were no more or less historical than the Middle Ages.
Balzac’s writing too is marked by Scott. In Lost Illusions, Lucien seeks fame
through writing a historical novel on ‘The Archer of Charles the Ninth’. Lost Illusions
also focuses on competitive Parisian literary careers, in which the power of magazine
articles spells fame or doom both for the authors of books and also for the authors and
performers of plays. In provincial counterpoint a young inventor struggles to make good
with a breakthrough in printing technology. (Within the American fictional canon,
Melville’s Pierre may most closely parallel Balzac’s plot-vector from country to a cutthroat urban literary world.) Balzac also was stirred by the fiction of Fenimore Cooper,
the first major career in American prose fiction, though cursed by being known as ‘the
American Scott’.
This is the institutional density that begins to show the novel as accruing
continuity and authority: Balzac, a French novelist with a major career, responds to
Cooper, an American novelist with a major career, who was responding to Scott, a British
novelist with a major career. Henry James considered that the corpus of Balzac’s Human
Comedy was the founding authority for the whole novelistic enterprise. We remember
James for his technical refinements and exquisite moral casuistry, but James understood
that novel writing was above all a combination of representation and imagination, in both
of which Balzac excelled. The two powers combine, for James, to produce what novels
stand or fall on, the ‘strange irregular rhythm of life’.19 Again, with James, I get ahead of
myself.
12
From 1830, I turn more specifically to the United States about 1850. This
moment, chosen by F. O. Matthiessen to inaugurate his ‘American Renaissance’, also
maps on to several other scales.20 In my experience as a teacher, it marks the moment
that American writing achieves general legibility for students. Of course it’s possible to
teach students to read colonial writing or Emerson or Cooper, and Franklin can at
moments seem wholly available; and with the exception of moments in Thoreau,
Dickinson, and Whitman, none of the writers of the 1850s is a snap, but broadly, they get
it.
I have argued elsewhere that the political crisis produced by slavery transformed
the relationship between most ambitious American writing and the American public.21
Greil Marcus makes a similar argument to different effect in his recent The Shape of
Things to Come.22 His argument is almost irresistibly attractive to teachers of literature:
around 1850, the meaning of the founding American documents, the compacts on which
American independence and citizenship are based, eroded out of American political
speech – with the final exception of Abraham Lincoln; since then only American writers
(including songwriters and screenwriters) have carried on those values in their works,
often encoded obscurely, so that it requires special interpretative skill to find them. If we
accept this claim for cultural authority, then American literature has been tremendously
important for the last hundred and fifty years, and skilled critical readers, and those who
can teach students to become skilled critical readers, are tremendously important, because
we – the community of literature – form the hiding place of lost America.
It seems different to me. I think that what happened around 1850 is that what had
in Cooper been fiction as ‘national’ narrative became in Hawthorne and Melville fiction
13
as ‘literary’ narrative, a world elsewhere, based on the author’s imaginative autonomy
rather than the shared, but contested, world of democratic values. So what Marcus does,
and with him, the main traditions of American Studies since World War Two, I call the
‘nationalization of literary narrative’.23 It’s a form of allegory, making a text say
something different from what is written. I certainly understand that there are good
motives for doing this, but I think it’s wrong.
So back to 1850. In just a few years there appeared three novels that together
start the commonly recognized history of the novel in the United States: The Scarlet
Letter, Moby-Dick, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne establishes
the authority of his narrative through contrast to his ‘official’ work in the Custom House.
Working for Uncle Sam diminished his imagination, and only after he is free from, as we
would say, alienated labour, can he return to himself, which allows the true powers of his
own feelings to connect with those of Hester and Dimmesdale, two hundred years ago.24
Uncle Tom’s Cabin enacts the same turn from false politics to true feeling, but to
remarkably different effect. Think of the touchstone Chapter Nine, ‘In Which It Appears
That a Senator Is but a Man’. This title makes you wonder: just how will the senator be
shown up and brought down from his lofty status? If Stowe had written an angry satire,
she might show a high-talking political idealist taking a bribe (‘man’ signalling human
weakness) or even taking sexual advantage (‘man’ signalling masculine gender). What
Stowe does to the senator is not destructive. She shows that he is better than he planned
to be. Political man is transformed into common humanity, abstract legalism into face-toface responsibility. In the state house, the Ohio senator supported legislation forbidding
assistance to escaped slaves, but in his wife’s house, he helps Eliza and her baby escape.
14
As a politician, he criticized ‘sentimental weakness’, but the magic of ‘the real presence
of distress’ converts him. The senator’s wife is already disposed to sympathize, and she
is fully won over when Eliza asks her, ‘Ma’am, have you ever lost a child?’ The
experience of death, shared between characters within the novel, and between characters
and readers outside the novel, opens connections between present and past and between
person and person. Across barriers of class, race, and gender, we ‘feel but one sorrow’.
Slavery had been banned by the Compromise of 1850 from national political discussion.
Stowe’s genius turned women’s disenfranchisement into the chance to oppose slavery
because it made you feel wrong.25
One reason Moby-Dick has become so central to arguments about the American
novel, or romance, is because it makes such strong gestures of affiliation with the lines of
emergence that I have been elucidating in this piece – no doubt reading back through
Melville.26 Moby-Dick is dedicated to Hawthorne. Its rhetoric is saturated in
Shakespeare, even to the extent of miming blank verse and setting the ‘Sunset’ chapter as
Ahab’s soliloquy, in defiance of the conventions of first-person narration. Not only do
we have paratextual evidence that Melville had been reading and thinking about Goethe
while writing Moby-Dick, but the chapter ‘Forecastle – Midnight’ is modelled on
Walpurgisnacht from Faust.27
I have claimed that by 1850 the novel in the US had achieved institutional
continuity, yet this claim could be challenged. Hawthorne’s career as a writer of full
length fictions extended at most a decade, Melville’s even less, and he published no work
of fiction after 1857, even though he lived to 1891. Of the three authors who inaugurate
the American Age of the Novel, only Stowe continued an active career after the Civil
15
War – in Hartford, Connecticut, she enjoyed warm personal relations with Mark Twain.
The careers most associated with the next phase of the history of the novel in the United
States, those of Twain, William Dean Howells, and Henry James, all begin in the 1860s,
as if it were really a new beginning, a starting over from almost nothing.28
The claim for institutional continuity might most firmly rest on the Atlantic
Monthly. This Boston-based, high-culture journal, which had published work by Stowe
and Hawthorne before the war and had attempted to recruit Melville among its founding
team of authors, flourished in the next phase, as did also Harper’s, which before the war
had been associated with publishing works from abroad, for which foreign publishers did
not have to be compensated. These surviving journals seem to mark the way for new
serious quarterlies, such as Scribner’s and Century, which carried great cultural authority
in the later nineteenth century.29
The fable of William Dean Howells’s career bears repeating for the light it casts
on patterns of cultural authority. He rose from Midwestern rural obscurity to a central
place in the culture of his time, editing the Atlantic Monthly for a decade (1871-80) and
then writing a featured editorial column in Harper's for nearly thirty years (1886-92;
1900-20). His move from the Atlantic to Harper’s symbolizes the shift in cultural
authority from Boston to New York, thematized in the novel of Howells’s that now
seems most rewarding and available, A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890). I find Howells
powerfully interesting as a case, and I am in some awe of his discernment as a young
writer making his way. His imaginative power falls below that of his intimate friends
James and Twain, but as novelist, editor, theorist, and ideologist of the novel’s cultural
importance for the United States, he embodied the success of the institution at its peak.
16
He lived long enough for Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken to make him seem ridiculous
and contemptible to a new, freer generation of realists, but they were very much working
on ground that he had opened. It seems to me that the difficulty Americans now have in
recovering Howells marks the distance we have come in emerging from our Age of the
Novel.30
17
Notes
1
On the historical semantics of the term literature, see Raymond Williams, Keywords:
A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976; rev ed. New York: Oxford University Press,
1983), pp. 183-88.
2
On this media-history, see Jonathan Arac, “What Kind of History Does a Theory of the
Novel Require?” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 42.2 (2009): 190-95.
3
On “Literature as an Institution,” see the classic essay by Harry Levin (1946),
incorporated in the first chapter of his enduring study of French realism, The Gates of
Horn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 16-23.
On the problematic of career, see Jonathan Arac, Commissioned Spirits: The Shaping
of Social Motion in Dickens, Carlyle, Melville, and Hawthorne (1979; Columbia
University Press, 1989), pp. 23-31 and Edward W. Said, Beginning: Intention and
Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975), pp. 224-61.
4
5
See Raymond Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory” (1973),
in Problems of Materialism and Culture (London: NLB, 1980), pp. 31-49.
For fuller and more knowledgeable thoughts on this point, see Katie Trumpener,
“World Music, World Literature,” in Comparative Literature in an Age of globalization,
ed. Haun Saussy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), esp. 189.
6
7
“Presentism” is used here in the sense defined by Ewan Fernie, “Shakespeare and the
Prospect of Presentism,” Shakespeare Survey Volume 58, ed. Peter Holland (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005): “Where new historicism emphasizes historical
difference, presentism proceeds by reading the literature of the past in terms of what most
‘ringingly chimes’ with ‘the modern world.’”
http://cco.cambridge.org/uid=10734/extract?id=ccol0521850746_CCOL0521850746A01
7
8
See Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review new series
no. 1 (January-February 2000): 54-68. On Moretti, see Jonathan Arac, “AngloGlobalism?” New Left Review new series no. 16 (July-Aug 2002): 35-45.
9
Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters (1999), trans. M. B. DeBevoise
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). On Casanova, see Jonathan Arac,
“Commentary: Literary History in a Global Age,” New Literary History 39.3 (2008):
751-54.
18
10
For one case study within this immense process, see Jonathan Arac, “The Media of
Sublimity, Johnson and Lamb on King Lear” (1987), in Impure Worlds: The Institution
of Literature in the Age of the Novel (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), pp.
24-33.
11
See the introduction (in German) by Hans Robert Jauss to his 1964 edition (with Max
Imdahl) of Charles Perrault, Parallèle des anciens and des modernes, the key work in the
1690s “querelle.”
12
Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; with Critical
Observations on Their Works, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006),
I:290.
13
In his dictionary, it is defined as “learning; skill in letters.” Samuel Johnson,
Dictionary of the English Language (1755), facsimile (London: Times Books, 1979).
See Arac, “Commentary,” 755-56 and also Stefan Hoesel–Uhlig, “Changing fields:
The Directions of Goethe’s Weltliteratur,” in Debating World Literature, ed. Christopher
Prendergast (London: Verso, 2004), pp. 26-53; and Pheng Cheah, “What Is a World?
On World Literature as World-Making Activity, Daedalus 137, no. 3 (2008): 26-38.
14
15
On the relation of Carlyle to Melville, see Commissioned Spirits, pp. 139-63. For the
connection to Schlegel, see “The Impact of Shakespeare: Goethe to Melville,” in Impure
Worlds, esp. p. 21.
16
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929), ed. Susan Gubar (Orlando: Harcourt,
2005), p. 56; the quotation in the next sentence comes from p. 67.
17
Victor Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris: 1482 (1831; enlarged edition of 1832), ed. MarieFrançois Guyard (Paris: Garnier, 1959), pp. 207, 209-24.
18
Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel (1937, 2d ed. 1961), trans. Hannah and Stanley
Mitchell (1962; Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), esp. pp. 81-85 (emphasizing Balzac).
19
Henry James, “The Art of Fiction” (1884) in Essays, American and English Writers,
ed. Leon Edel (New York: Library of America, 1984), p. 58. For his richest assessment
of Balzac, see “The Lesson of Balzac” (1905), in Literary Criticism: European Writers
and the Prefaces, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Library of America, 1984), pp. 115-39.
20
F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson
and Whitman (New York: Oxford University :Press, 1941).
21
Jonathan Arac, The Emergence of American Literary Narrative: 1820-1860
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).
19
Greil Marcus: The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006). For instance: “Since Lincoln, the drama
in which the country judges itself, asks itself what it really is, what it is for, measures the
promise by its betrayal and the betrayal by the promise, has been played out most
intensely in art: in speech and acts that begin with a single citizen—a single imaginary
citizen, a character made up by a novelist, a singer, a filmmaker, a performer—saying
what he or she has to say, as it there are others attending to those acts and speech, even
thought there may be none” (p. 58).
22
23
See Jonathan Arac, “Why Does No One Care about the Aesthetic Value of
Huckleberry Finn?” New Literary History, 30.4 (1999): 773.
24
See Jonathan Arac, "The Politics of The Scarlet Letter," in Ideology and Classic
American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986), pp. 247-66, repr. in Jonathan Arac, Against Americanistics
(Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming).
25
For fuller discussion, see Jonathan Arac, afterword to Signet Classic edition of Harriet
Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (New York: New American Library, 2008), pp. 50918.
For some perspective and bibliographic guidance on the topic of American romance,
see Jonathan Arac, “Hawthorne and the Aesthetics of Romance,” in Cambridge History
of the American Novel, ed. Leonard Cassuto et al. (forthcoming).
26
27
For the most thoughtful reflection on this connection, see Franco Moretti, Modern
Epic: The World System from Goethe to García Márquez, trans. Quintin Hoare (New
York: Verso, 1996), p. 61.
28
For more on this trio of careers, see Jonathan Arac, “The Age of the Novel, the Age
of Empire: Howells, Twain, James ca. 1900,” in Pablo Mukherjee, ed., Victorian World
Literature, forthcoming as a special issue of Yearbook of English Studies 41.2 (2011).
29
See the great reference work by Frank Luther Mott, History of American Magazines,
originally published in three volumes, covering 1741-1885 (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1938) and subsequently enhanced by two further volumes extending the
chronology to 1925. For Harper’s Monthly, see 2:383-405; for Atlantic Monthly, 2:493515; and for Scribner’s and Century, 3:457-80. See also the important magazine-focused
study by Nancy Glazener, Reading for Realism: The History of a U.S. Literary
Institution, 1850–1910 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).
20
30
For more on Howells, focused on A Hazard of New fortunes, see my “Babel and
Vernacular in an Empire of Immigrants: Howells and the Languages of American
Fiction,” boundary 2 34.2 (2007): 1-20.