| Despite recent revisionist efforts, the canon of pre-twentieth-century American literature has maintained its core identity since it was first set in place in the nineteenth century by the most resolute group of canonizers of the day, American literary historians. These historians were the first to shape narratives detailing a native tradition, and their stories were intended not only to nominate the "great" writers of the United States, but also to instill a "right-minded" civic, moral, and aesthetic sensibility that would bind together the disparate cultures of the young country. Hayden White argues that the writing of histories is necessarily the writing of "fictionalized" narratives; it is therefore especially interesting to return to these earliest stories and analyze their function as rhetorically charged "fictions.".;Written from 1828 until mid-century, texts by first-generation historians Samuel Kettell, Samuel Knapp, Rufus Griswold, and Evert and George Duyckinck, sought to create an "instant" literary tradition by deploying a rhetoric of plenitude that said that any written documents composed since the English settled in North America were "literature." Although most of that literature could not compare with international standards for "great writing," American writing was significant for its "historical worth.".;Moses Coit Tyler's histories stand as transitions between early and late nineteenth-century works. His texts resemble first-generation texts, but he heralds a new approach in American literary historiography by deferring to Anglo traditions and introducing aesthetic criteria for determining a text's "literariness.".;Following Tyler's example, second-generation writers of the 1880s and 90s like Charles Richardson, Barrett Wendell, attempted to rewrite their precursors' histories, and did so by excluding vast numbers of previously canonized authors, restricting their studies to "representative and great" writers, and valorizing only belletristic genres.;Fred Lewis Pattee's work represents and culmination of late-nineteenth century literary historiography because his numerous works consolidate the gains made by his predecessors. He successfully introduces American literary history into the nation's classrooms as both a legitimate object of pedagogy and as a respectable discipline in and of itself, but his understanding (and ours) of American literature is firmly grounded on a nineteenth-century perspective. |
