| The African American Literary Institution, an Episodic Analysis , takes for its purview a conglomeration of literary activities and ideas that attended the emergence of Afro-American literary institution. Through an examination of diverse relationships of patronage, publication and reception trends, and criticism, I construct a version of the convoluted Afro-American literary historiography from Phillis Wheatley to the publication of Invisible Man. I focus the analysis on representative moments and texts, and on the basis of these analyses, I make broad but tenable generalizations about important institutional attitudes and their impact on the course and nature of literary publications. I analyze correspondence, book reviews, criticism and biographies, directly and not so directly acknowledged ideational and literary influences, and debates about differing approaches to, and philosophies about, Afro-American education.;As representatives of a people whose literacy had been long suppressed, African-American writers' entry in to the literary marketplace was something of a puzzle to literary pundits, somewhat in the vein of how modernists and avant-gardists took the literary culture by storm in the early decades of this century. Both were refreshingly new phenomena that also challenged entrenched views about literature and culture. More important, however, was the fact that they demanded space as legitimate subsets of extant literary ontologies. But modernists and avant-gardists were highly self-conscious groups reveling in experimentation and iconoclasm, who, like Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, found a way, through limited editions, of creating for themselves a sustaining patronage before commercial success helped them gain viable spaces as literary idioms. The Afro-American writers' step, on the other hand, was an uncertain groping into a culture that the vogue in intellectual history had represented as being way beyond their intellectual grasp. Thomas Jefferson's famous assertion that Phillis Wheatley's poems were "beneath the dignity of criticism" captures for me something of the literary ambiance from which these writers' work emerged. I emphasize the institutional aspects as a means of foregrounding the nature of literary agency and its complex implications for these Afro-American writers' ultimate desire to achieve literary autonomy. |
