The Extra 613
Perry Miller praised it for systematizing and summarizing current knowledge, but he also raised a fundamental doubt which now sounds quite familiar: “it forces upon us the question of whether the concept of a ‘history of literature’ is any longer viable or even feasible…the question of whether there really can exist a history of literature instead of a history of the something (or many somethings) with which literature is concerned.” Miller also questioned what he felt was the authoritarian nature of too many of the contributors and thus the work as a whole.
In the preface to the second edition published in 1953, the editors seem to have been responding directly to Miller’s criticism in defining their intentions more sharply: “The master plan of the work may thus be seen more clearly, it is hoped, as a literary history of the United States rather than as a history of American literature. The view of literature as the aesthetic expression of the general culture of a people was an axiom in the thinking of the editors. They adopted an organic view of literature as the record of human experiences and of its history as the portrait of a people. The book they have written tells a single unified story.” The concern with unity- both narrative and national- is the controlling theme of the “Address”: “The relation of what is called the American way of life- which really means the American way of thinking and feeling- to the national unity is extremely important. Our national unity does not depend upon blood or upon inherited tendencies. Thus very naturally our literature, which is a record of our experience, has been deeply, often subconsciously, aware of its responsibility in the making of a nation from a complex of peoples in voluntary union.” The definition of literature in this history is “any writing in which aesthetic, emotional, or intellectual values are made articulate by excellent expression.”
The ”Address” goes on to define several key characteristics of the American way, such as progress, mobility, democracy, and independence, that are recognizable in the best literature, and it is implicitly argued that the presence of these themes enables us to
“A Scholarly Summing Up of American Literature,” New York Times, Sunday Book Review, 5 Dec. 1948, p. 4.
Robert E. Spiller et al., eds., “Preface to the Second Edition,” Literary History of the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1953), p. ix.
Spiller, “Address to the Reader,” Literary History, p. xxii.