Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2012, English

This dissertation proposes that the 1890s were critical to the formation of American literature because of their focus on identifying, collecting, and preserving an American literary tradition. Since 1930, when Fred Lewis Pattee claimed that the twentieth century began in the 1890s, a continuing strain in literary criticism has investigated the decade as the birthplace of modernism. In recent years, however, scholars have begun troubling these historical assessments of the era in order to recover a more nuanced understanding of the decade. Building on their work, I study how competing narratives of American literature existed in the 1890s alongside the fin de siecle movement toward literary nationalism. I recover a group of long-lost literary historians who envisioned a more inclusive American literary canon than was eventually adopted in the early years of the twentieth century. I use the term “scenes of negotiation” to refer to discussions of American literature in late nineteenth-century social discourse about the development of a national American literary tradition. More specifically, I argue that these scenes of negotiation can be read as literary history because no fixed narrative of American literature yet existed. These scenes of negotiation make discernible how accounts of literary history emerged at multiple sites, in multiple genres, through multiple agents. The Introduction identifies some of these scenes of negotiation and explains why they should be read as American literary history, which records the history of literature in America through an examination of texts and/or authors. Organized around specific case studies, the chapters explore how literary historians working singly or in conjunction with others documented the 1890s as a period of literary retrospection and consolidation. Chapter 1 investigates how Edmund Stedman and Ellen Hutchinson's co-editorship of A Library of American Literature resulted in one of the late nineteenth century's most (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Elizabeth Renker PhD (Advisor); Steven Fink PhD (Committee Member); Andrea Williams PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature