Reviews of Books

Jared Gardner's Master Plots gathers and develops the early claims of late 1980s and early 1990s Americanist literary criticism on the subject of race. His book frames an argument about how early national literature helped organize United States identity in terms of race, a specifically American "race" that was neither indigenous nor European but "white." Studying texts considered loosely canonical before the canon debates of the 1970s and 1980s, Gardner finds in Royall Tyler, Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, and Edgar Allan Poe those "master plots" for which his book is titled, plots that "inform…and form" (p. xii) national identity as racial. The preliminary "attempt to define an American race by excluding all that is external to the nation," he argues, "turns into a widespread drive to purge the nation of an imagined internal contamination" (p. 3). Thus, canonical American literature is central both to cementing the identification of American-ness with whiteness and to developing the racist energies of white American social and political practices.

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These are powerful and provocative claims with a big purview. Gardner's slim study sketches in broad strokes its support for them. He focuses mainly on five primary texts—Tyler's Algerine Captive, Brown's Edgar Huntly, Cooper's The Pioneers and The Prairie, and Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym—and draws for contextual support on a handful of visual, scientific, and popular texts, such as book frontispieces, political cartoons, the Connecticut Wits' Anarchiad, Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, Samuel George Morton's crania measurements and illustrations, George Tucker's A Voyage to the Moon (1827), the unattributed 1820 novel Symzonia, and, in its most fascinating instance, newspaper articles pasted into a copy of Frederick Douglass's "The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered," including one essay entitled "White Man Turned Black—A Problem for Physicians" and other racist "scientific" pieces intended apparently to rebut Douglass's claims, which Gardner discovered at Grinnell College's library.

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