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Textually shaped. Gender-oriented study is illuminating here both as pointing the investigator to one of culture’s most basic institutions and as pointing to the distortiveness of any clear-cut one-to-one correspondence between biographical gender and the alignment of the individual literary product within gender-specific traditions. Gender-oriented study thus in principle both establishes the importance of social forces in literary history and teaches us to resist simple deterministic accounts of those forces, leading us to a model of literary institutions as partially autonomous but not independent.
Second, the feminist revisionism in American literary studies, by emphasizing the Euro-American scope of women’s literary culture, can help us to avoid the Americanist’s most persistent and deep-seated ethnocentrism: the myth of American literature as a distinctively native growth. The elements of native distinctiveness, naturally stressed by the first generations of American literature scholars as they attempted to justify the new specialization, now need to be counterbalanced by studies- still lamentably few- that discuss American writing from a transcontinental perspective.
Third, feminist scholarship may inspire us to attend more seriously to the interlinkages between “serious” and “popular” literature and thereby bring us to realize how porous is the boundary between them and how artificial and quaint is the still standard practice of generalizing about the nature of American literature on the basis of a limited number of mountainpeak achievements. From a feminist revisionary standpoint, this practice is objectionable chiefly because it tends in practice to relegate all but a few women authors to the ranks of the subliterary. But the anti-elitist argument is applicable to men’s writing also. Certain features of Hawthorne’s work, for example, such as the transformation of Pearl from elf-child to real woman when the icon of family
The most trenchant recent critic of the limitations- the futility as he sees them- of American literary-historiographical claims to American distinctiveness is William Spengemann. See for example, “American Things/Literary Things: The Problem of American Literary History,” American Literature, 57 (1985), 456-81. The most ambitious attempt to date to see nineteenth-century American letters in a transcontinental perspective (that at the same time makes place for the American distinctiveness that Spengemann questions) is Robert Weisbuch’s Atlantic Double-Cross (Univ. of Chicago Press, forthcoming).