The Integrity of Memory
Creating a New Literary History of the United States
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3137067 |
|---|---|
| Authors | A Kolodny (0000-0002-6682-5684, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1985 |
| Volume | 57 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 291 |
| Publication date | 1985-05-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Literature (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0002-9831 • E-ISSN: 1527-2117 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2926068 |
| OpenAlex | W2335112501 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 9 |
T is a propitious moment to be rewriting the literary history of the United States. Two decades of unprecedented scholarship and criticism have excavated lost authors for our reconsideration, delineated literary traditions of which we had been previously unaware, and raised probing questions about the very processes by which we canonize, valorize, and select the texts to be remembered. In the wake of all the new information about the literary production of women, Blacks, Native Americans, ethnic minorities, and gays and lesbians; and with new ways of analyzing popular fiction, non-canonical genres, and working-class writings, all prior literary histories are rendered partial, inadequate, and obsolete. One might well conclude, therefore, that these are sufficient reasons for two major university presses committing their considerable resources to the displacement of Robert E. Spiller and Willard Thorp's Literary History of the United States (that monumental pony upon which generations of American literature graduate students, from I948 on, rode to their Ph.D. orals).' But something besides the new scholarship may also be in the air. The coincidence of Columbia and Cambridge University Presses independently deciding to embark on new literary histories of the United States may reflect, as well, the rhetorical mood of the nation in the I98os. Let us consider, after all, that the eighties were to be the decade of healing and consolidation. With the volatile I960s, the Vietnam War, and the Watergate scandals supposedly
Art · History of literature · Literary criticism · Literature · Miscellany · Political science · Rhetorical question · Scholarship · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American Literature and Culture · Classics · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law
Writing Women in Early American Studies
Evolving Approaches to U.S. Culture in the American Studies Movement
One Need Not be A Chamber-to be Haunted
Between Individualism and Fragmentation
The Golden Carp and Moby Dick
Marginalizing Early American Literature
The Philosophical Bases of Feminist Literary Criticisms
American Autobiography
Ethnographies”
| Unique citing works | 9 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,23 |
| Citation span | 1987 - 2007 (21) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 6 |