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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 uses the particularly prominent and sensitive South Slav context to compare how representatives of dominant and subordinate literary cultures attempt to characterize and narrate the history of smaller national literatures. It begins from a notion of exchange whereby dominant literary nations are traditionally perceived to export stylistic features for emulation by writers in subordinate literatures and systems of periodization and classification for adoption by those literatures’ historians. In return, these subordinate literatures gain a channel of communication through which some degree of recognition or cultural legitimacy may be bestowed. The chapter addresses recent efforts by the academic community of dominant cultural systems to move beyond national models of literary history, focusing on accounts by pre-eminent scholars Linda Hutcheon, Stephen Greenblatt, Pascale Casanova and David Damrosch that use South Slav examples to make their case. These accounts are set against the earlier endeavours of Serbian literary historians – Jovan Skerlić, Pavle Popović and Svetozar Petrović – who engage with similar questions in their complex local context. The chapter argues that this attempt to eradicate a political agenda identified in the national approach to literary history in fact reinforces the hegemony of the dominant over the subordinate.

Across the period from 1880 to 1930, the processes of rethinking the past can be read as a historical gesture as significant as the consideration of wholly new works of art, resulting in a period of experimentation, negotiation, hybridity, and historical dualities. Despite pressures to valorize the modern and thus separate literary eras at the century’s dividing mark, authors from the turn of the century, or the T-20 period, explore their historical legacies as well as anticipatory inscriptions of the new. Calling for a reading practice that encourages both forward and backward glancing, essays collected in this volume attest to the irreducibility of the century’s turn, which can be read as an era of historical complexity rather than as a period shaped by a decisive teleological march into new intellectual territory. Exploring the permeable boundaries and elastic categories of a literary history rich in multiple investments, essays here stress American literature’s navigation of moving boundaries that encompass not only temporal markers but intersecting literary and cultural traditions.

Beginnings and Endings dates from 1980. Parts of it were presented at a conference on Writing Literary History organized by Wlad, and again in 1981 at a conference on The Institutions of Criticism. As indicated by the titles of these events, both of which were attended by many leading literary critics firmly entrenched in the opposing camps of either historical or text-oriented criticism, the taxing challenge was twofold. The proponents of historical literary criticism were asked to account for the practice of writing in the constitution of literary history, and the text-oriented critics to confront the fact that writing not only gives rise to self-referential texts, but also to discourses on literature such as literary history. Furthermore, both camps of professional critics were subtly invited to respond to what kind of institutional pressures shape the critical traditions to which they subscribe.

The introduction provides a summary of the genre’s literary history from its earliest roots to the contemporary novel, presenting important examples of alternate history literature from nineteenth century French novels to early-twentieth century essays and more recent examples of science fiction short stories, novels, television and films. It provides definitions and distinctions for key terminology such as ‘nexus point’, ‘counterfactualism’, ‘secret history’ and ‘alternate future’, as well as an overview of important existing research, and explores the relationship between alternate history texts and their source historical narratives. After setting out the aims and aspirations of this collection of essays, the introduction concludes with a precis of the essays in the rest of the collection, underlining connections between them.

The author links the purview of the “new-consciousness” novel to Edward Said’s conceptualization of “decentered consciousness,” a term he uses to describe postcolonial cultural and intellectual efforts that aim at disrupting constituencies and ideologies of dominance and essentialism. Following a historical approach to understanding the emergence of novelistic genres, this chapter reviews the historical conditions surrounding the production of several Egyptian novels—from Muhammad Husayn Haykal’s Zaynab to what Sabry Hafez calls the “New Egyptian Novel” of the 1990s—to exhibit how the novel, in responding to its historical moment, defies definitional stability due to the dialectical process of historical change. The socio-political and cultural context underlying the rise of the new-consciousness novel is similarly analyzed to detect the homologies and disjunctures it has with its antecedent counterparts as well as highlight its new distinct and cohesive semantic and formal features of heteroglossia and what it achieves as a corpus.

This concluding chapter offers a succinct overview of London’s position in the canon of American literary studies and highlights important biographical and critical studies of the author’s work. Over the last three decades, serious scholarship on Jack London has continued to expand and deepen. International readers also incline to see him as an archetypal American writer. Following London’s death, however, literary modernists in the 1920s, whose formal difficulty catered to a culturally elite audience, were wary of his popular accessibility and largely ignored his writing. But his major concerns—generating consolatory value in an increasingly post-theistic world, remedying exploitive socioeconomic systems, and achieving a more nuanced understanding of our psychobiology—remain central to societal, political, and intellectual debates worldwide. The cultural-theoretical turn that shaped most scholarly discourse by the early 1980s initiated a more comprehensive re-evaluation of his writing. By the 1990s a London revival in the academy was well underway and scholars continue to generate innovative critical approaches to his work.

This chapter examines how the ‘return to the story’ has been used to further an anti-modernist agenda and to delegitimize avant-garde or experimental mid-century novelistic aesthetics. Specifically, it examines the work of Jean Rouaud, a writer whose investment in the ‘story’ is exemplary of a wholehearted adoption of an anti-modernist conception of literary return. Putting Rouaud’s sprawling and digressive essayistic adventure novel The Imitation of Happiness (2006) into dialogue with Rouaud’s fictional and essayistic production since the early 2000s, this chapter problematizes the literary historical narrative that underpins Rouaud’s ‘rehabilitation’ of the adventure novel. It then zooms out to consider how this anti-modernist emphasis on adventurous fiction is echoed in the rhetoric of the famous littérature-monde manifesto. A short analysis of littérature-monde then demonstrates how the return to the story functions not only as a literary history but also as a cultural map. This chapter concludes with a critique of the anti-modernist literary historical narrative of the ‘return to the story.’

This afterword stresses the importance of the concept of translation within the field of contemporary transatlantic literary and cultural studies. It also offers an alternative to the theoretical framework offered by traditional national literary history and literary historiography as the main paradigm for the study of literature. Finally, based on the work of Erich Auerbach and Brent Hayes Edwards, it suggests the articulation of a model of transcultural literary history based on the notion of relationally at the core of édouard Glissant’s notion of a “poetics of relation.”

In a broadly historical essay Herder examines the ways in which poetry and song reflect national character. Important distinctions between the objects and subjects of poetry, especially the relation between song as object and singing as subject, provide a comparative framework throughout and become the foundations for a critical language to represent modern culture and politics (e.g., the relation between Volk and Nation). Herder carefully traces the historical development of national literary traditions, but he draws the reader to considerations of poetry and song in the contemporary world of the Enlightenment. He concludes by drawing attention to the ways in which certain genres of poetry and song extend beyond the traditions of single peoples, acquiring a greater impact as transnational.

This chapter profiles Gordon Hutner, founding and long-time editor of the major journal, American Literary History, and critic of American literature. It tells how he founded the journal and the ins-and-outs of editing it. It also discusses his recent work inventorying modern American fiction. It draws on an in-depth interview that gives many revealing details about his work and career.

This chapter considers the colonial heritage of the main literary prizes specific to African writing in French in the post-war period, awarded by the Association nationale desécrivains de la mer et de l’outre-mer (ANEMOM). It demonstrates how the ANEMOM gradually adapted to the changing political and cultural context of decolonization during the vingt glorieuses and examines how it sought to preserve certain aspects of France’s colonial imaginary by consecrating the ‘Empire de la langue française’.

Beginning with Antony Gormley’s Transport sculpture in Canterbury cathedral, the Introduction introduces key conceptual premises of the book. It shows how Transport re-presents bodies in time in a fashion that recalls characteristics of medieval cultural practices: ecclesiastical space, written texts such as Piers Plowman, The Book of Margery Kempe, Mystery plays and devotional texts. Discussion of religious iconography between The Book of the Duchess and The Miller’s Tale shows how Chaucer’s writing occupies a distinctive place in this blurring of boundaries between historical materiality, scriptural history, and contemporary fictions. Bodily transport between Chaucer’s own works anticipates the transport that is yet to be made of them in works that he did not compose.