| Review | Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive era, 7.4

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| Review | Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive era, 7.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Reviews

Gilded Age and Progressive Era Literary Scholars Create a Lasting Legacy

STOKES, CLAUDIA. Writers in Retrospect: The Rise of Literary History, 1875–1910. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. xi + 241 pp. Introduction, notes, index. $59.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8078-3040-2; $19.95 (paper), ISBN 0-8078-5720-3.

Writers in Retrospect expands our understanding of the historical forces that consolidated and professionalized the study of American literature during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Generally speaking, this is a story that has been told by a number of historians about a variety of professions, but Claudia Stokes's emphasis on the national-identity issues so frequently associated with literature gives her case special heft. When doctors, lawyers, and engineers staked their claim on a particular kind of expertise—a "culture of professionalism," to quote from the title of Burton J. Bledstein's 1976 book—they paid little attention to questions of national identity. But as Stokes points out, their counterparts in English departments at universities such as Columbia and Harvard regularly engaged such questions as part of an effort to promote a wider understanding and appreciation of American literature. Between 1880 and 1910, these fledgling Americanists organized the nation's literature into periods, highlighted the most important writers, and identified principal texts and themes. The scholarship of Charles F. Richardson, Edmund C. Stedman, Moses Coit Tyler, Brander Matthews, Barrett Wendell, and others had a decisive impact on how American literature was studied and taught. Stokes notes that even today—after decades of canon busting and ideological criticism—"we continue to rely heavily upon late nineteenth-century research, methods and beliefs" (7).

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