Double booking: How editors rewrote the American Renaissance in the Cold War

In the middle of the twentieth century, the most treasured texts of the American literary canon were reedited into definitive editions, utterly transforming them from products of the nineteenth century into products of the twentieth. As American scholars selected and promoted certain literary works as representative of or central to the national image, the development and consolidation of national power that helped motivate their work found its way, through the physical remaking of texts, onto the very pages of the works they chose to enshrine. If authorship means not an original act of inspired genius that gives birth to a text but rather a functional construct that both legitimizes the literary artifact and delimits the range of its possible meanings, then the historical moment of that author-function lies as much in the twentieth-century recomposition of the work as in the nineteenth-century composition of it. Undertaken in editorial projects that were designed to influence any other editions that followed in their wake, the influence of that new authorship persists. This study traces the imprint of that re-authoring upon definitive editions of Melville, Poe, and Dickinson, theorizing on the politics of editorial methodology and detailing how the specific methodology and design of each edition leaves the imprint of Cold War values---values that were largely responsible for the definitive editing project's origin---upon those authors' texts. Guiding metaphors and methodologies that have special political significance in Cold War America are shown to hold sway over editors' reconfigurations of these American Renaissance authors according to twentieth century terms: corporeality and military authority in Melville's case, cultures of collecting in Poe's and innocence and youth in Dickinson's. Attendant upon this reauthoring comes an unsettling effect of textual doubling, where the new edition---based on an ostensibly stabilizing empirical ideal---finds itself divided between two competing authority figures: the author and the editor-as-author. The resulting crisis of authority and control further reinforces the text's double indemnity to two separate---but also significantly linked---historical moments: mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth century American cultures of crisis over internal division, control, and subversive authority.