Abstract
This chapter examines the anthology as a conspicuous form of canon formation. Following an introduction to the structural paradoxes of this publishing genre, the chapter provides a brief overview of its development in Britain, before turning to a comparative reading of American anthologies from the late eighteenth century, edited by Mathew Carey and Elihu Hubbard Smith. As a next step, it examines US-American anthologies from the early nineteenth century to show a shift of focus that resulted from an increasing commercialization of the market and changes in taste, the latter being defined by transatlantically refracted views of American writing.
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Notes
- 1.
The word miscellany originally meant “a dish of mixed corn” (Bonnett 25), an image that differs from that of the anthology, understood as a collection of flowers, and underlines the anthology’s more systematic and selective nature.
- 2.
Ferry mentions John Cotgrave’s 1655 The English Treasury of Wit and Language as an early use of the word “treasury” in a title of a literary collection (18). Other popular metaphors used in the titles of early modern anthologies were “heirlooms,” “gems,” “brilliants,” and “jewels,” all of which imply not only beauty and preciousness, but also permanence and indestructibility.
- 3.
As Barbara M. Benedict points out, miscellanies “worked to commercialize elite printed culture” (“Beauties” 319): they turned literary works into commodities by making more literature available for more readers. They responded to readers’ increased appetite for fine literature, while “offering high literature at an affordable price” (Benedict, “Literary Miscellanies” 412). Thus, one important function of anthologies was to “mediate between individual readers and literary culture” (Benedict, Making 3).
- 4.
Aleida Assmann’s examples are Noah’s ark in an interpretation by St. Victor from the twelfth century, Darius’s coffer featured in a Heine poem and a box of books from a short story by E. M. Forster.
- 5.
Leah Price’s recent study on the anthology as a genre, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel, repositions the anthology right in the midst of the development of a genre that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came to be far more dominant, but seems to be immune if not averse to the anthology. She argues that anthologies were crucial to the novel as their publication mode shaped the practice of novel writing. She repositions the anthology as a central factor in the emergence of a novelistic aesthetic by tracing the prominence of abbreviation methods in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
- 6.
Aleida Assmann argued that writers of the twentieth century made “a daring leap” by looking for traces of the past in “trash” (“Texts, Traces, Trash” 132, emphasis in the original).
- 7.
Poetry is the genre that was most closely associated with the definition of a national literature: “We want a poetry which shall speak in clear, loud tones to the people; a poetry which shall make us more in love with our native land…,” the reviewer of Griswold’s Poets and Poetry of America, E. P. Whipple, wrote (38). By the 1830s, one objection against American poetry was its ubiquity: “The ease with which a moderate skill in versification is acquired, and the copious flood of poetic expressions which is poured into every mind of every school-boy, enable most men of taste and feeling to write what is called respectable poetry with great facility” (6). The British Fraser’s Magazine wrote that Americans are keen readers of poetry, but “[t]he formation of a national poetic temperament is the work of a long education,…” (Anon., “American Poetry” 10). Thus, while American achievements in the field of prose writing are criticized, but not fundamentally contested, their competence in the genre of poetry was essentially questioned, by American and British critics alike.
- 8.
“Transatlantic” had been in use since the early 1780s (OED); it then referred to the crossing of the Atlantic rather than acting as a conceptual framework. For the British editor(s) of The Columbian Lyre, American literature had to be made accessible and quite possibly also merely interesting by comparison to British writers. The first poem in this collection, with the title “Ontwa,” was written by Henry Whiting, but the editor does not mention the poet’s name. Instead he explains to his readers that the author must have “evidently [been] an admirer of our countryman, Sir Walter Scott, whose style he closely imitated” (3). American literature had to be translated into an aesthetic code decipherable for the British reader. Furthermore, giving such a prominent position to Whiting’s Indian poem (which is followed by a lengthy account of Indian customs and manners taken from the manuscripts of the Governor of Michigan) suggests that anything Indian was a major commercial asset on the British market and perceived as what constituted “American” literature.
- 9.
This was proposed by Barbara Korte, who detects such potential especially in survey and teaching anthologies (11).
- 10.
On commonplace books, see Susan Miller’s Assuming the Positions and Susan Stabile’s Memory’s Daughters.
- 11.
This collection did not contain a preface or introduction, but a letter, addressed “to a certain Gentleman” that was “prejudic’d against the author.” The author playfully takes pains to contest accusations that he is a rogue. Far from being programmatic, this letter opens up a collection of essays on topics such as “Of the Goods of Fortune” or “Of Ignorance and Mistake,” which, because of their general inexpressiveness, turn this collection into an indistinct, bland work (Anon., Select Essays 3).
- 12.
Carlson notes that this collection possibly had appeared as early as in 1736, but there are no copies of such an early edition left (xi).
- 13.
In fact, Byles not only wrote poetry in honor of Pope, he also sent several letters to London’s great poet and was rewarded with copies of Pope’s books. On Byles’s cult of Pope see Giles, Transatlantic Insurrections 17–39 and Tennenhouse 36–42.
- 14.
In 1773, a Royalist printer called James Rivington requested poets to submit their material to him, but the War for Independence put a harsh end to his publication plans for an anthology (see Pattee, “Anthologies” n.p.). The volume was meant to be called A Collection of Poems by the Favorites of the Muses in America (Vanderbilt 51).
- 15.
Serious historical work being a taboo subject for women in the eighteenth century, they were accepted as helpmates doing antiquarian work. Cooper’s project, too, was accomplished under the aegis of a male scholar (she writes in the Preface); in order for her anthology to be broadly acknowledged, she depended on male support (see Lethbridge 185).
- 16.
Dodsley’s anthology had its readership in America and was well remembered, see, for instance, the brief review of A Collection of Poems as part of a biography of Dodsley in a Port-Folio edition of 1804 (Anon., “Biography”).
- 17.
Anthologies that could serve as examples here are Thomas Campbell’s Specimens of the British Poets (1819), William Hazlitt’s Select Poets of Great Britain (1825), and Robert Southey’s Specimens of the Later English Poets (1807) and Select Works of the British Poets (1831). Warton’s four-volume oeuvre was endowed with two essays on Romantic literature and the history of learning in Britain and followed a chronological development. Warton claimed that he put into practice with his History Alexander Pope’s plan of writing a history of English poetry (Preface iv). Warton left out Anglo-Saxon writing for similar reasons that Ellis shunned it, i.e., it stemming from a time when “we were an unformed and unsettled race” (iv) and before “our national character began to dawn” (iv).
- 18.
For a monograph-length survey of the Columbian Magazine, see Free.
- 19.
In his 1834 Autobiography, Carey wrote that “[n]ever was more labour bestowed on a work, with less reward. During the whole 6 years, I was in a state of intense penury. I never at any time, possessed 400 dollars,—and rarely three or two hundred” (qtd. in Green, “Printer to Publisher” 28).
- 20.
In fact, Select Poems remains a somewhat elusive volume. Pattee had to admit that he had not yet found a copy, even though he knew there existed one (Carey advertised it). For one of the view discussions of this anthology, see Göske, “Die Poesie” 592–93. Beauties of Poetry contained advertisement for Select Poems. The latter sold for one sixth of a dollar. See also Stoddard and Whitesell 311. In 1791, one dollar was worth the equivalent of roughly 25 USD today.
- 21.
On eighteenth-century American poetry and its relation to Augustan poetry, see Dowling and Giles, “Augustan-American Literature.”
- 22.
In the June edition of 1792, for example, Beauties was included among the books that Carey advertised, selling for four fifths of a dollar. He also advertised his first anthology, Select Poems (from 1787). The presence of these adverts, for works such as Hugh Blair’s Sermons and a jest book among others, endows this collection with a mercantile frame shared by other commercial print publications of the time, and makes the magazine a useful tool for Carey, the busy editor attempting to circulate as much material as possible to a wide readership.
- 23.
The Columbian Muse has been called “the first of many blatant frauds in the history of American canon formation” (Göske, “Contests” 250). The episode that Göske refers to reminds us that many allegedly meaningful milestones in the development of a canon happened by mere accident and are thus utterly contingent. James Carey pulled out of the endeavor once 1,500 copies had been printed, closing his shop in New York due to financial problems and escaping south. Mathew Carey was left behind with his share of the copies. He subsequently abandoned his promotion of American poetry in favor of financially more rewarding projects.
- 24.
Pattee also mentions another anthology edited by Carey in 1809 entitled The Cabinet of Momus; a Choice Selection of Humorous Poems, containing several humorous poems by Philipp Freneau (“Anthologies” n.p.).
- 25.
Smith was keen on publishing a second anthology. In his Preface he mentions that the editors, the plural form being another clear hint at the editorial collaboration behind American Poems, were planning to continue their work (v); between 1794 and 1795 he tried to collect enough material for this project (see Cronin, Introduction 14–15).
- 26.
For Smith, a Federalist, regionalism had to be avoided by all means—which did not keep him from putting together a record of his region’s writing rather than a national one, so here is a clear contradiction between his aim and the result. As was pointed out by Bottorff, Smith excluded anti-Federalist and liberal poets, and had a strong bias for New England poets, most of whom were known Federalists (xvi).
- 27.
There are, of course, also other texts that could be included in this chapter: Rufus Griswold’s The Poets and Poetry of America, for example, was published in 1842, and in 1847 followed an anthology of American prose writing. The Duynckinck’s Cyclopaedia of American Literature, too, counts as a (later) anthology from 1855. These works will reappear in Chapter 5 because they are anthologies with a strong historical and quasi-narrative interest, which puts them in line with the conventions of literary historiography.
- 28.
His anthology was ridiculed: Specimens was soon to be dubbed “Goodrich’s Kettle of Poetry” (see Vanderbilt 52). By the 1820s, a large number of commonplace books and other compilations were published, which were often the targets of satire by authors such as Edgar Allan Poe.
- 29.
Only 5 years before, John Neal, one of Kettell’s preferred authors, had published essays on 135 American writers in Blackwood Magazine and included biographical sketches of these authors, too. They were published collectively as American Writers.
- 30.
In fact, Kettell hints at these hostilities when he mentions that his anthology is meant to “look seriously into the grounds of the insinuation thrown out some years ago by our neighbours across the ocean, that there was no such thing as an American book worthy of being read” (v).
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Straub, J. (2017). Of Gems, Beauties, and Relics: Anthologies in Early America. In: The Rise of New Media 1750–1850. The New Urban Atlantic. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58168-6_4
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