Major Writers of America I-II [antikvár]

A Preface BY THE GENERAL EDITOR Major Writers of America is made possible at this point in time not so much because the energies of its editors have been prodigious but because the study of American literature—inside and outside the universities—is now systematic and mature. This happy state of affairs is relatively recent. In fact, like the professional study of English literature, it is only about seventy-five years old. Of the two literatures, however, the American remained largely terra incognita for several decades after its discovery. History repeated itself: the Old World was settled first. Yet the New did not lack for those who could rise to the challenge of its promise. Tlie essential landmarks were discerned. The terrain was mapped. In the perspective of these seventy-five years of discovery and exploration then, the present work acknowledges many profound debts: to the pioneer adventurers, such as Moses Coit Tyler, William Peterfield Trent, and Barrett Wendell; to subsequent masters who are represented herein by entries in the bibliographies as well as by their students; and, further, to a host of scholars contemporary with the editors, often younger than they, who attest the vitality of the vocation. It was altogether natural that in the initial stages of this American "Great Instauration" claimants to academic dignity should strive to impress their colleagues in departments devoted to the magnificent literatures of England or of the Continent or of antiquity by heaping up as mountainous a bulk of American expression as research could excavate. While it was indisputably evident that American literary history was of painfully short duration— commencing with the seventeenth century and even then for a hundred years or more offering only "colonial" documents—still there were unearthed such permanently significant minorities as Philip Freneau, Joel Barlow, Charles Brockden Brown, and the authors of The Contrast and Modern Chivalry. These beginnings made, the advance continued into the wilderness. New recruits expended tremendous energy in "rediscovering" forgotten authors—