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Arguing that the changing and more consolidated literary politics of the century’s turn helped make possible the canon wars of the twentieth century, this paper investigates the history of literary histories. Twentieth-century constructs of the field overlook an awareness that late-nineteenth century female literary historians envisioned in terms of a more inclusive and democratic American literary canon. Recovering a literary history largely erased by the turn into the twentieth century through a case study of Sarah Piatt’s career, this chapter focuses on two female literary historians of the 1890s: Ellen Mackay Hutchinson and Jeanette Gilder, whose literary anthologies include Piatt’s writing, unlike those of the following century. Hutchinson, who (with Edmund Clarence Stedman) edited a sizeable collection of American texts, the eleven-volume Library of American Literature, and Jeanette Gilder, co-editor of The Critic, who hosted a popular election to identify the top 125 American women writers of 1890, made arguments for the inclusion of Piatt in the canon that are worth revisiting in light of turn-of-the-century mechanisms for erasing the literary history of which Piatt was a part.

This chapter focuses on a rare success story among the poetries of small European nations: the transition of the Greek C.P. Cavafy (1863-1933) from national to global poet. The chapter shows how the poet’s status and image abroad is effectively defined by a synergy of actual translation and retranslation and diverse forms of imitation, which over the course of decades, and in a context of intense dialogue between literary systems, has changed Greek critical attitudes towards the poet and fostered international interest in Greek poetry. Centrally, Cavafy experiences fresh ‘translation’ in the poetry of others. In various examples where a poet’s encounter with Cavafy is dramatized in verse, the lines are blurred between appropriation, elective affinity and near-fictionalization. Anthologies of poetry inspired by Cavafy translated into Greek have changed his status in Greek literature and enhanced his myth. In turn, projects like 12 Greek Poems after Cavafy show how a poet’s presence within world literature creates interest in the inner workings of his or her national literature.

Examines the reception of black US writing in Spain in order to contextualize and defamiliarize it as literatura negra norte-americana. By studying the translations, anthologies, and bilingual Spanish-English texts in which works by Hughes and Claude McKay appeared alongside works by leading figures of the Afro-Caribbean negrismo movement (Nicolás Guillén and Emilio Ballagas), this chapter reveals the ways in which black diasporic writing was given a unique new genealogy. Moving away from the Francophone négritude movement and reducing Africa to a source of a remote cultural past, figures like Ballagas collaborated with Spanish critics like Guillermo de Torre to reinterpret contemporary black writing as produced distinctly by the crossings of the US and Spanish empires. US black writing thus illuminated and complicated Spain’s racial past. Hughes, in turn, became for Spaniards and Spanish Americans alike the poet of an uncertain vision of blackness and leftist revolution. This vision was adopted by the Spanish Republicans during the civil war, just as they were paradoxically purging any notion of Moorish “blackness” or Africanism from their own political identity—something that Hughes himself engaged when he translated their poems on “Moorish traitors.”

Accused of parading as ‘a Dandy in the clean and elegantly ornamented streets and trim gardens of his verse,’ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow drew the ire of literary nationalist peers who insisted that his reverence for Old World tradition stifled American creativity. As a professor of European languages and literatures, however, a surprisingly radical Longfellow fought to give Americans access to a cosmopolitan education in open lectures, anthologies, and translations. In his reading of Dante and Goethe, he searched for universal elements of literature, which he invoked to counteract nativist claims made by the Young Americans, whom he satirized as jingoists in his novel Kavanagh (1849). In his narrative poem Evangeline (1847), Longfellow puts his theory of literary universalism into practice as he shapes an American landscape ruled by emotion, not territorial conquest.

I want to begin with what some might cite as a characteristic move of the socialist intellectual in capitalist society: namely, biting the hand that feeds you. In the course of explaining to me the rejection by the National Endowment for the Humanities board of a highly-rated proposal for a Seminar for College Teachers, the NEH program officer wrote that “some reviewers were concerned that the focus on the canon, while doubtless an important issue for teachers of American literature, lacked the kind of scholarly significance generally expected of Summer Seminars. . . .” Pursuing this theme, he later wrote that my “application was rather more thesis-driven than most of our seminar proposals.” I discover everywhere signs of this division. On the one side, we find the supposedly pedagogical or professional problems raised by the question of the canon, and on the other side, what is lauded as “of scholarly significance” or, more simply, criticism or theory. In a recent “Newsletter for Graduate Alumnae and Alumni" issued by the Yale English Department, for example, Cyrus Hamlin ruminates “precisely how this procedure of hermeneutical recuperation” he is proposing “should affect the canon and the curriculum of our institution is difficult to say. . . .” and he proceeds to ignore the question (p. 2). In the same document, Margaret Homans suggests why he does so. “At Yale,” she writes . . . while post-structuralism has proven to be intellectually more unsettling than liberal humanism, the feminist versions of post-structuralism are institutionally more easily accommodated than some of the projects of liberal feminism, such as challenging the content of the canon we teach, with its vast preponderance of white, male authors (p. 4). . . . Interestingly, Homans here appropriates the project of canon revision solely to the domain of “liberal feminism,” a common enough way of trying to limit the scope of this intellectual movement to a supposed clique of uppity, middleclass women.

For those interested in change, raising consciousness is the critical first step, and a good deal of literary work is directed to that end. But as Frederick Douglas pointed out, it is a first step only—and often a frustrating one at that. . . . As I read and contemplated the subject [slavery], behold! that very discontentment which Master Hugh had predicted would follow my learning to read had already come, to torment my soul to unutterable anguish. As I writhed under it, I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy. It opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder upon which to get out. . . . Ladders have been fashioned, however short and wretchedly fragile, and many have used them to scramble from the pit. But ladders do not level pits. And Douglass was quick to see that while he might as an individual escape the pit, he would never be safe until the pit itself, the institution of slavery, had been eliminated. This chapter is not about changing individual consciousness, but about changing institutions. The beauty of institutions like slavery or patriarchy, at least for those who benefit from them, is that their perpetuation requires no conscious effort. On the contrary, though filling in the pit requires enormous collective effort, keeping it open and deep can be accomplished even while regularly denouncing its existence. Indeed, academics, none of whom ever told a “darkie” joke, few of whom would speak of a “broad,” and all of whom favor equality and the Polish workers, nevertheless help maintain the pits of academic racism and sexism. My objective here is not to make a cynical point about how the road to hell is paved with liberal intentions. But after a quarter century of efforts to achieve racial and sexual equality in education, those goals do not seem in most respects strikingly nearer.