Reviewed by:

• American Literature in Transition, 1770–1828 ed. by William Huntting Howell and Greta Lafleur
• Patrick M. Erben (bio)

Reading American Literature in Transition, 1770–1828 feels like attending a conference of the Society of Early Americanists or C19: Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists: the variety of critical and scholarly approaches, diversity of contributors, and breadth of subjects demonstrate the vitality and maturation of the field of early American studies. Howell and LaFleur's collection should put to rest debates about whether our field suffers a theory deficit and neglects aesthetics and form. The volume's essays adroitly handle topics as wide-ranging as using queer crip theory and decolonizing Native literary aesthetics; they also sharpen our attention to genre with a scope of themes including paranoid style and revival hymn poetics. The volume's wealth of information, density of primary text references, and bibliographic coverage also equip anyone teaching early American literature courses with fresh pedagogical impulses and a wellspring of spin-off subjects to guide undergraduate and graduate research; as with good teaching, the essays assiduously note the greater amount of work remaining to be done on a variety of topics, texts, authors, and archives. Yet [End Page 167] herein also lies a bit of the crux: to achieve this coverage, individual essays perform a feat of scholarly compression that is sometimes difficult to unpack. As the volume is part of a larger anthological series, Nineteenth-Century American Literature in Transition (edited by Cody Marrs), this comes as no surprise; indeed, one can sense each writer's struggle to distill their knowledge into such compact servings. After reading this volume, one may crave the scholarly expansion found in the authors' longer-form work in journals and monographs, for which the essays collected here serve as a veritable amuse-bouche. My "how to use this book" advice is to sample from its rich menu according to critical taste, scholarly interest, and pedagogical demands.

What I appreciate most about Howell and LaFleur's introduction is the way they foreground their personal motivations, the present political stakes of scholarly work on the US national founding period, and the dialoguing between "cultural instability" (15) in the present and the many transformations of the early national period. The volume understands its episodic approach ("exposure and assemblage") as a corrective to the "consensus history" that, especially in present-day right-wing ideological framing, endows the early Republic with a mythos of "probity and clarity" (1). The essays gathered under three sections ("Form and Genre," "Networks," and "Methods for Living") should thus be understood as "a generative and deeply interesting cacophony instead of a triumphal march" (1), especially by focusing "on the quotidian and even the banal" rather than "the exceptional" (13). I understand the rhetorical valency of such terms to signal the disruption of received political narratives and staid literary methodologies, but their hyperbolic tone actually belies a bit of what makes the volume strong—that bedfellows like a survey of foundational legal documents and a deep dive into early national cookbooks are not strange after all, for both tease out how texts seeking to create order actually mask power, inequality, and exploitation. But maybe if the editors promised a "cacophony" and my reading experience yielded through-threads among seemingly disparate essays, the volume's "generative" approach has simply achieved its purpose.

The section on "Form and Genre" features the largest number of essays, contrasting contributions on mainstays of early Republican letters, such as the "Genteel Novel" and the "Statesman's Address," with more commonly ignored forms, such as evangelical poetry and cookbooks. Matthew Garrett's "The Law of Form and the Form of Law" reveals the literary strategy [End Page 168] of documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as integral to the nation-building project: like literary synthesis, the state "organizes the component parts into an imaginary whole on the basis of their simultaneous autonomy and collective functionality" (25). Though becoming more inclusive in its "expression of citizenry" (22), the early national mode of social organization and rhetorical...

审阅者：

• 转型中的美国文学，1770-1828 年编辑。作者：威廉·亨廷·豪厄尔和格蕾塔·拉弗勒
• 帕特里克·M·埃尔本（简介）

阅读《转型时期的美国文学，1770-1828》感觉就像参加早期美国主义者协会或 C19：十九世纪美国主义者协会的会议：批评和学术方法的多样性、贡献者的多样性以及主题的广度都展现了其活力和内容。早期美国研究领域的成熟。豪厄尔和拉弗勒尔的收藏应该平息关于我们的领域是否存在理论缺陷并忽视美学和形式的争论。该卷的文章巧妙地处理了广泛的主题，如使用酷儿瘸子理论和非殖民化本土文学美学；它们还使我们更加关注各种主题的流派，包括偏执风格和复兴赞美诗诗学。该书丰富的信息、密集的主要文本参考文献和书目覆盖范围也为教授早期美国文学课程的任何人提供了新鲜的教学动力和指导本科生和研究生研究的衍生主题的源泉；与良好的教学一样，这些文章孜孜不倦地指出，在各种主题、文本、作者和档案方面还有大量工作要做。然而，[完第 167 页]这里也存在一点症结：为了实现这种覆盖，个别论文执行了学术压缩的壮举，有时很难解开。由于该书是更大的选集《转型中的十九世纪美国文学》（由科迪·马尔斯编辑）的一部分，因此这并不奇怪。事实上，人们可以感觉到每位作家都在努力将自己的知识提炼成如此紧凑的内容。读完本书后，人们可能会渴望作者在期刊和专着中发表的较长篇幅作品中的学术扩展，为此，这里收集的文章是名副其实的开胃小菜。我的“如何使用这本书”的建议是根据批判品味、学术兴趣和教学要求从其丰富的菜单中进行选择。

豪厄尔和拉弗勒尔的介绍中我最欣赏的是他们突出个人动机的方式、美国建国时期学术研究当前的政治风险，以及当前的“文化不稳定”（15）与许多转型之间的对话建国初期。该卷将其情节方法（“暴露和组合”）理解为对“共识历史”的纠正，特别是在当今右翼意识形态框架中，赋予早期共和国以“诚实和清晰”的神话（1 ）。因此，聚集在三个部分（“形式和流派”、“网络”和“生活方法”）下的文章应该被理解为“一种富有生成性和深刻有趣的杂音，而不是胜利的进行曲”（1），特别是通过关注“日常生活甚至平庸”而不是“例外”（13）。我理解这些术语的修辞效价，以表明对公认的政治叙事和稳重的文学方法论的破坏，但它们的夸张语气实际上掩盖了本书的强大之处——这就像对基础法律文件的调查和深入研究早期的国家烹饪书毕竟并不奇怪，因为它们都揭示了寻求创造秩序的文本实际上是如何掩盖权力、不平等和剥削的。但也许，如果编辑们承诺“不和谐”，而我的阅读经验在看似不同的文章中产生了贯穿的线索，那么这本书的“生成”方法就达到了它的目的。

“形式和体裁”部分包含最多数量的论文，将早期共和主义文学的支柱性贡献（例如“文雅小说”和“政治家演说”）与更常被忽视的形式（例如福音派诗歌和烹饪书）进行了对比。马修·加勒特（Matthew Garrett）的《形式法则与法律形式》揭示了《独立宣言》和《宪法》等文件的文学策略[完第168页]作为国家建设工程的组成部分：就像文学综合体一样，国家“组织各组成部分在其同时自治和集体功能的基础上变成一个想象的整体”（25）。尽管其“公民表达”（22）变得更具包容性，但早期国家的社会组织模式和修辞......