Literary Nationalism

Firman
Inan Sri Utari
Siti Aisyah Akhtar
Stephen Ali Barkah
 Literary Nationalism
For most of the latter half of the twentieth century, mid-nineteenth-

century American literary nationalism appeared to be a straightforward

subject. Early Americanists such as F.O. Matthiessen (19021950) and Richard

Volney Chase (19141962) mapped out what Matthiessen labeled an

"American Renaissance," centered on the New England and New York writers

Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882), Henry David Thoreau (18171862),

Nathaniel Hawthorne (18041864), Herman Melville (18191891), and Walt

Whitman (18191892). These authors were perceived to have adopted the

main tenets of European Romanticism and to have adapted them to the

demands and possibilities of what was still a new nation. Thus, while James

Fenimore Cooper (17891851) could claim in Notions of the Americans (1828)

that there was "not much to be said" about American authorship, and that it

is "obvious that . . . the literature of England and that of America must be

 Women and Literary
Nationalism
More
The exclusion
recently,ofthis
women
dichotomy
from the
has
nationalist
been reassessed
canon wasina various
product ways:
of the

critics suchwomen's
belief that as Jane lives
Tompkins have argued
were confined to thethat the sentimental
domestic sphere and fiction of
that their

writers
selves were
including
defined
Harriet
accordingly.
Beecher In
Stowe
some(18111896),
ways, the writers
SusanofWarner
the American
(1819

1885),
Renaissance
and Fanny
underwrote
Fern (Sarah
the process:
Payson Willis
following
Parton,
the18111872)
death of the
performed
leading

essential cultural work

transcendentalist and is
Margaret as important
Fuller as the
(18101850), works of
Emerson Hawthorne
spent and
many years

Melville
subtly undermining
in the construction
her reputation;
of an American
likewise,literature.
Hawthorne Thus,
andmost
Melville
famously
resented
in

the
andcase
ridiculed
of Stowe's
the success
Uncle Tom's
of their
Cabin
much
(1852),
more commercially
sentimental narratives
successfulfunction
female

as
contemporaries,
jeremiads showing
condemned
their American
by Hawthorne
reader-ship
in a how
letterthe
to country
his publisher
is straying
as a

from its proper

"damned mob ofcourse, warning
scribbling of theLater,
women." consequences if matters
a generation are that
of critics not

rectified,
accepted and
implicitly
promising
the primacy
nationalofand
the spiritual
public, political
salvationworld
if, as
assumed,
Stowe puts
almost
it,

people's
by definition,
feelings
that "are
writing
in by
harmony
womenwith
would
the
besympathies
inferior andof
unimportant.
Christ" (p. 624).

Uncle Tom's Cabin is largely addressed to wives and mothers and is an

attempt not only to imagine the nation from a female perspective but also to
 Multicultiral Literary
Nationalism
A further product of the construction of an American literary canon

comprised of white New England and New York writers involved in adapting

(and distancing themselves from) the European Romantic tradition was the

marginalization of other racial voices. Much recent criticism has demonstrated

that fugitive slave narratives can be seen to construct a very different kind of

national literary identity that both embraces and subverts dominant narratives

of individualism and self-reliance. In addition, scholars such as Eric J. Sundquist

and John Carlos Rowe have extended the critical studies of African American

literature conducted in the 1960s and 1970s in order to illustrate the presence

of African folklore alongside strategies of affirmation developed to deal with

centuries of oppression, not only in slave narratives but also in the work of

white writers such as Melville. Sundquist sees a reciprocal process of exchange

between the traditions of European American and African American literatures,