Books, Arts & Manners: A Mirror of the Times

Columbia Literary History of the United States, edited by Emory Elliott et al. (Columbia, 1,384 pp., $59.95)

Forty years ago, under the general editorship of Robert E. Spiller of the University of Pennsylvania, the Macmillan Company published the magisterial Literary History of the United States, which, with its supplements, set the standard for works of its kind. The new Columbia Literary History is therefore a very optimistic performance. For, with a team of some seventy authorities, it aspires to do for this demanding and obstreperous generation of American scholars what Spiller and his associates did for theirs—attempts this while acknowledging that it can no longer be done. But the new history does make its claims, presenting itself as more ambitious than its predecessor, larger in scope, self-consciously “reconstructed” in the mixture of interpretative strategies it struggles to combine in understanding the sequence and multiplicity of serious American writing. Though its editors postulate “diversity, complexity, and contradiction” as the necessary implication of their labors and assume overtly that “no unifying vision of a national identity” can be achieved, they believe their book to be advantaged by its own internal divisions. Even a working “consensus,” they say, would mean “closure.” These attitudes make forty years seem like a very great while.

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M. E. Bradford

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Columbia Literary History of the United States, edited by Emory Elliott et al. (Columbia, 1,384 pp., $59.95)

Forty years ago, under the general editorship of Robert E. Spiller of the University of Pennsylvania, the Macmillan Company published the magisterial Literary History of the United States, which, with its supplements, set the standard for works of its kind. The new Columbia Literary History is therefore a very optimistic performance. For, with a team of some seventy authorities, it aspires to do for this demanding and obstreperous generation of American scholars what Spiller and his associates did for theirs—attempts this while acknowledging that it can no longer be done. But the new history does make its claims, presenting itself as more ambitious than its predecessor, larger in scope, self-consciously “reconstructed” in the mixture of interpretative strategies it struggles to combine in understanding the sequence and multiplicity of serious American writing. Though its editors postulate “diversity, complexity, and contradiction” as the necessary implication of their labors and assume overtly that “no unifying vision of a national identity” can be achieved, they believe their book to be advantaged by its own internal divisions. Even a working “consensus,” they say, would mean “closure.” These attitudes make forty years seem like a very great while.