Why?

Research is my passion, perhaps even my obsession; it empowers my students, whether they are traditional university attendees or Humanities Council participants.  Recovery work–restoring neglected texts and authors to visibility and legitimacy–expands our perspective on American culture, not only by restoring worthy writers to visibility, but also by recontextualizing canonical writers and illuminating the politics of aesthetics. With its vast technological transformations, social upheavals, and economic inequities, the nineteenth century still has much to teach us. The link from the photo on my homepage presents my work more formally and economically; this page represents my ruminations. As a mathematician perdue–my Wellesley majors were English and mathematics–I recently prepared a mind map of my book publications, which I’ll share here.

 

Being told in graduate school that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was “popular trash” and that Sarah Orne Jewett was a “good local colorist” helped inaugurate my interest in recovery work. When I began my career, scholars had many fewer resources at their disposal. Instead of Google Books, we had card catalogs; instead of amazon.com, we had local bookstores. Rooting around in the stacks–I remember one blazing hot summer working in Yale library’s un-air-conditioned American literature section–provided daily surprises and sparked connections. Among other discoveries, I found that Ina Coolbrith (1841-1928), the first Poet Laureate of California, published a sonnet called “The Mariposa Lily,” which San Francisco native Robert Frost almost certainly read before he wrote “Design.” In many ways, he’s a nineteenth-century writer.

Frost has always fascinated me partly because he attracted academic audiences yet sold books and packed lecture halls (diverging from Dickinson’s view that “Publication–is the Auction / Of the Mind of Man,” he asserted, “I think that a book ought to sell. Nothing is quite honest that is not commercial”).  My recovery work in American women’s writing has enlarged my understanding of canonical writers such as Dickinson, Hawthorne, and Whitman. Coupled with my several years teaching abroad, this work has reanimated my understanding of what we mean by “American literature,” including an expanded appreciation of how genres and periods overdetermine how we read. Is a text, metaphorically speaking, a butterfly or a bug? A bug or a bird? How and why do such distinctions matter, both for literary studies and for everyday life?

Nontraditional, nonliterary, and hybrid genres press us to reconceptualize norms that are central to anthology studies and literary studies more broadly. We must ask: What is “excellent” writing?  “Representative” writing?  How do audiences (and publishing economics) determine selection criteria?  Our assumptions about aesthetics include ideas about the appropriate role of emotion and politics in literary texts, ideas profoundly influenced by social identity and cultural status.  An important nineteenth-century environmental author, Lydia Sigourney, was much admired during her lifetime for her affective virtuosity, but her works gradually came to be regarded as sentimental. Calling writers sentimental, whether they be Sigourney or Rachel Carson, deauthorizes them. “Tree-huggers” can’t effect change, but “environmental advocates” might.

Understanding how we arrived at our current cultural and environmental situation–and imagining how we might improve our prospects–continues to propel my research and my teaching.  Why and how did the nineteenth century’s immensely popular poetry move from the center to the periphery of American culture?  How did our shifting attitudes about emotion propel this change? What outlets have our collective affective lives discovered?  The poems in Over the River and Through the Wood indicate that one channel was children’s literature. Adults often superimpose their desires on children, and thus children’s literature–always written for both audiences–provides an exemplary opportunity to glimpse elders’ unguarded aspirations. Children’s literature has also fostered positive change, empowering nineteenth-century intellectual and social leaders like Harriet Beecher Stowe and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. In our contentious, dangerous, unequal era, it has continuing potential. As I concluded Fallen Forests, “without the future, memory is meaningless, and history vanishes.” Who will imagine and create the future, and how might we help?