literary history only by giving up the study of American literature altogether.
The particular problem of American literary history arises from the fact that while the term "American literature" purports to connect something historical, "America," to something called "literature," these two are in fact incompatible; for the idea of literature at work here is fundamentally ahistorical, while the sort of history implied by the word "American" is political or geographical rather than literary. As Americanists commonly use the term, "literature" is merely a nominal category for writings that meet their own retroactively imposed criteria of literariness. It does not denote a thing that exists continuously in nature, gives rise to successive literary texts, and thus relates them historically to each other. The word "American," conversely, does not describe some literary feature of the texts it identifies- their language, say, or their style, or structure, or genre- as would a modifier like "Romantic" or "Russian." It merely denotes the citizenship of their authors, and only by transferring that citizenship from author to text can Americanists even appear to lend the word a literary connotation. Since Emerson is an American prose writer, it is generally assumed, he must be a writer of American prose. But not even this adjectival switch really succeeds in giving the word "American" a literary meaning. If "American prose" means "prose written by Americans," then the category is too large and far too various to be exemplified by Emerson. In the first case, "American prose" has nothing necessarily to do with America; in the second, "American" says nothing of literary significance about the prose.
Because "American literature" posits no necessary relation between the historical entity we call "America" and those writings we call "literature," historians of American literature have had to find some way to fill the intervening space. For purposes of review, the various strategies they have devised may be classified as "historical," "literary," and "mediatory," according to their proponents' relative affection for things American and things literary. Among historical methods, the oldest and the one most clearly predicated