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Aesthetics, Feeling, and Form in Early American Literary Studies

Our field has always had a vexed relationship to aesthetics. In its late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century prehistory, critics repeatedly apologized for the unliterariness of early American authors: Anne Brad-street was an exemplary Puritan but a merely derivative poet (Tucker 154); Benjamin Franklin was a representative American but more of a clever rhetorical stylist than a writer of great literature (Sherman 92). As a yet unnamed and largely neglected stepchild of what was itself the still minor field of American literature, and lacking any major canonical author in the English tradition, early American literary studies was characterized by a profound commitment to historicism. For example, Perry Miller, the most influential practitioner of the mid- twentieth century, could be described as a religious and intellectual historian as much as a literary scholar.1 Miller’s legacy would continue to exert an important gravitational pull through both his voluminous body of writing and the efforts of numerous impor-tant students, including both literary scholars such as Alan Heimert and David Levin, and historians such as Bernard Bailyn and Edmund Morgan. It is no surprise then that the formalism that dominated major fields of lit-erary studies such as the Renaissance and modernism in the 1950s and ’60s had very little influence in early American studies.

The timing of our disciplinary coalescence during this era only com-plicated matters. Not long after Early American Literature was founded in 1965, literary studies confronted the theoretical rejection of formalism, as articulated by such scholars as Geoffrey Hartman and Paul de Man, which gradually pushed to the margins claims about aesthetic value and artistic excellence. By the 1980s, even as the advent of the New Historicism in-spired a critical focus on the rhetorical power of texts, the critique of aes-thetics as an ideological tool discouraged attention to elite literary forms and cultures of imagination, taste, and pleasure.2 For many early Ameri-canists, this critical shift away from aesthetics was consistent with their

edward cahill and edward larkin

236 } earlY aMerican liTeraTUre: VOlUMe 51 , nUMBer 2

understanding of the field; the Puritan distrust of art, the Federalist la-ment of American literary underachievement, combined with our own judgments of the field’s frequently strange, ungainly, fragmentary, anx-ious, even paranoid texts, all appeared to confirm that early Americans produced rich and fascinating traditions of writing, but only imitative or insignificant aesthetic cultures. According to this view, election day ser-mons, meditative poems, travel journals, captivity narratives, and gothic novels informed cultural histories of politics, religion, gender, race, and colonialism and bore useful witness to linguistic instability and ideological contradiction, but they told us less about the special ability of language to please the imagination and move the soul.

Nevertheless, as we approached the end of the twentieth century, aes-thetic questions would become a matter of keen interest to some of the field’s most prominent scholars, even if their primary concerns were his-torical or political. William Spengemann argued for an idea of early Ameri-can literature that was less concerned with an “imagined nationality” (34) and more attentive to the “stylistic innovations” of British colonialism (34). David Leverenz explored the significance of religious sentiment and fellow feeling in Puritan texts; and William Scheick and Teresa Toulouse exam-ined the aesthetics of their form and reception. Jay Fliegelman (Prodigals and Pilgrims) traced the way particular narrative tropes were reproduced in different forms across various media; Cathy Davidson described the ge-neric and affective work of early American novels; and Julia Stern, Eliza-beth Barnes, and Julie Ellison investigated the discourses of sympathy in these and other sentimental texts. Michael Warner elaborated the formal expression of republican print ideology in late eighteenth- century writing; and Robert Ferguson explained how a “consensual” aesthetic made such writing politically effective (8). Christopher Looby, Sandra Gustafson, and Fliegelman (Declaring Independence) extended this inquiry to the formal character and affective power of orality both within and beyond printed texts. David S. Shields (Civil Tongues and Polite Letters) detailed the role of taste, politeness, and sociability in the making of elite British colonial life; and William Dowling uncovered the Federalist investment in the literary imagination. These studies and numerous others used a diverse range of intellectual frameworks to bring new and sophisticated attention to aes-thetic questions about early American writing and produced a belated rec-ognition that the field had, perhaps, been literary all along.

Aesthetics, Feeling, and Form { 237

This recognition was surely inspired by theoretical work in the 1990s that insisted that aesthetics was far more than an elite screen for power and domination and thus demanded renewed attention. According to some scholars, it also played valuable roles in society, such as enabling democracy (Docherty; Ankersmit) and inspiring justice (Scarry). Others explained that the politics of aesthetics is always multiple and often contradictory. Terry Eagleton, for example, argued that aesthetics entails a “double- edged” commitment to both bourgeois hegemony and revolution-ary emancipation (9). This means that even the most elite works of art and literature contain within them the impulse to oppose the order of things and see the world anew. It may be that such contradictoriness is discour-aging to the ethically oriented literary scholar seeking to correct the biases and exclusions of previous scholarship, but as George Levine argued, “the recognition of literature’s entanglements with the politics of its moment . . . does nothing to deny its peculiar power to move and engage, or the critic’s responsibility to account for that power” (4). Such ideas gave rise to great expectations of an “aesthetic turn” in literary studies as we entered the twenty- first century.3

But in early American studies, as in most other fields, the turn never quite materialized. Instead, interest in aesthetic inquiry has been damp-ened by the methodological priority the field has more recently given to historicism and its chief analytical categories of power and difference. For well over two decades now, we have focused largely on the social, eco-nomic, and political significance of literary texts. We have insisted that such texts function essentially as evidence: either indexes to empirical realities or discursive sources of sociopolitical ideologies and identities. We have developed substantive institutional connections with historians, making interdisciplinary and archival research central to our scholarly practice and library fellowships a hallmark of professional success. We have con-structed a perpetually expanding archive of authors, texts, and nontextual artifacts and traditions, locating scholarly innovation in the exploration of Atlantic world and Native American cultures; Spanish, French, German, and Dutch language traditions; and the histories of colonialism, revolu-tion, race, slavery, gender, economics, religion, and science. As a cursory glance at several recent issues of Early American Literature indicates, we have examined such diverse discourses as that of silk production, child-hood, natural philosophy, maps, pirates, botany, counterfeiting, servitude,


and swamps, along with the more familiar traditions of novels, poetry, and religious, political, historical, and travel writing. At the same time, the field has grown and matured in impressive ways, drawing faculty lines, graduate students, and research funding, inspiring innovative conferences and pub-lications, and fostering impressively rich veins of critical inquiry. Indeed, it is fair to say that our field has never been stronger.

This success, however, appears to have come at the expense of both in-quiry into aesthetics and inquiry that privileges literature’s function as art and imaginative expression. It is worth thinking about these two modes of aesthetic inquiry as distinct, even though they often coincide. The former may be represented by a number of recent studies focusing on such things as elegy (Cavitch), the literature of politics (Larkin), feelings of English-ness (Tennenhouse), architecture (Faherty), constitutional aesthetics (Slau-ter), slavery and taste (Gikandi), the epic (Phillips), aesthetic philosophy (Ca hill), Loyalist literature (Gould), episodic form (Garrett), romance and community (Lilley), Puritan sympathy (Van Engen), gothic fiction (Roberts), drama and performance (Dillon), emulation (Howell), and the transatlantic book trade (Rezek). Like the studies that preceded them, each understands aesthetics as intimately related to politics and historical change, even as it attempts to take its aesthetic objects on their own terms. Most are grounded in intellectual or material history and committed to elaborate social and cultural contextualization. Yet, as their miscellaneous character suggests, these studies have not yet begun a coherent conversa-tion in the field about aesthetics and its relation to early American literary culture. More surprisingly, despite the prominence of individual mono-graphs, many of the ideas they consider remain marginal to the field’s main currents of thought. Consider, for example, that at the 2015 joint conference of the Society of Early Americanists and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, only one of the sixty panels offered was di-rectly related to aesthetics—a panel on “emotions in the British colonies.”4 A small number of panels focused on such things as “religion and rhetoric,” “short narratives,” “humor,” “print culture,” “print and performance,” “his-tories of reading,” and “theaters of dissent.” But none was specifically con-cerned with poetry, the novel, or questions of art, imagination, pleasure, or literary culture.5 Aesthetics in our field, it would seem, is both everywhere and nowhere.

In 1993, David S. Shields recognized the way theoretical critique had


turned our attention away from aesthetic inquiry and asked, “What litera-ture would be brought to light if one studied pleasure as a mode of power” (“Rehistoricizing” 549)? Why have we not done more to answer this ques-tion? More precisely, how is it that, even though some of the most influ-ential scholarship of the late twentieth and early twenty- first centuries has turned its focus on aesthetic matters, they have less urgency for many early Americanists today? Given the influence of the “new formalism” across literary studies fields and the emergence of lively polemics about reading strategies, why have we not seen a more consistent emphasis on aesthetics in early American studies?

To be sure, aesthetics and new formalism have not become dominant forces in others literary fields either. But we would identify three principal reasons why they have not gained more traction in ours. First, as we have seen, aesthetics remains too often tagged with the stigmas of elitism and—in the context of colonial violence and oppression—triviality. The antiaes-thetic claims of the 1980s discovered behind aesthetic objects the pursuit of mere “distinction” and the politics of what Walter Benjamin famously called “barbarism” (256). But they also helped to reorient early American-ists away from aesthetic to cultural and political categories of analysis. In particular, Jane Tompkins influentially demolished the traditional evalua-tive criteria that rendered sentimental novels beneath our consideration and, in doing so, advocated an approach to them rooted in the idea of “cul-tural work.” As she writes in Sensational Designs, “novels and stories should be studied not because they manage to escape the limitations of their par-ticular time and place, but because they offer powerful examples of the way a culture thinks about itself, articulating and proposing solutions for the problems that shape a particular historical moment” (xi). Tompkins’s argu-ment clarified how for far too long aesthetic criteria served as a tool for the exclusion of women, peoples of color, and other categories of writers and texts from the canon. But if it had the effect of realizing literature as a mere extension of politics and power, it also tended to discourage attention to aesthetics in works by the same once- disparaged writers that have now be-come central to our understanding of the field—such as Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, Susanna Rowson, Hannah Foster, and William Apess—even though aesthetics was often especially pertinent to their writing. In other words, because aesthetics was so deeply implicated in the marginal-ization of women and nonwhite writers, it seemed necessary to disavow it


tout court in order to imagine a more inclusive version of the tradition, and the salubrious expansion of our archive ironically brought with it an unfor-tunate narrowing of our critical assumptions.

Second, it may be that some early Americanists today eschew aesthetic studies because they are daunted by the notorious conceptual ambiguity of aesthetics. We will offer our own definition below. But here we acknowl-edge that aesthetic language often seems woefully imprecise, and not only to our empiricist sensibilities. Writers from Aristotle to Theodor Adorno have complained about the abstraction and volatility of aesthetic termi-nology. Literature, poetry, fiction, the fine arts, rhetoric, pleasure, imagina-tion, taste, genius, beauty, sublimity, creativity, sympathy, sensibility, emo-tion—each is undoubtedly an aesthetic category, but their meanings, limits, and relations to one another are not always so obvious or satisfying. When is rhetoric distinct from aesthetics? When is emotion more properly the focus of affect theory than aesthetic theory? When is writing specifically aesthetic and when is it best considered as discourse? If such seemingly intractable questions have led some scholars to abandon aesthetic inquiry altogether, they have led others to embrace a breezy generality that invokes the “X imagination” or “the aesthetics of X,” where X is whatever the sub-ject at hand happens to be. Perhaps such vagueness can be explained by the fact that it has been decades since graduate students of English literature were regularly trained in aesthetics—its concepts, histories, theories, and techniques (e.g., poetic scansion). But this omission has left many of us largely ignorant of ideas and strategies once understood to be fundamen-tal to literary scholarship.

Finally, it may be that aesthetic studies are discouraged by the material conditions of early American literary studies. Over the past decade the field has seen an influx of research funding available to scholars, particularly early in their careers, from institutions such as the American Antiquarian Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the McNeil Center of Early American Studies, and the Omohundro Institute.6 Without parallel in any other field of literary studies, this funding has undoubtedly led to better scholarship. However, there is also cause for concern, especially when it comes to the matter of the disciplinary shape of early American literary studies and, in particular, for questions about aesthetics. Although these institutions give fellowships to literary scholars, the vast majority of their funding is directed at historians, and the selection committees that choose


the fellows are disproportionately made up of historians who, for obvious reasons, favor projects organized around historicist methodologies and ar-chival research. The gravitational pull of this money thus creates a pressure on literary scholars, sometimes subtly, sometimes obviously, to position their projects in ways they believe will appeal to historians. Instead of pur-suing aesthetic, formal, or literary questions, that is, early Americanists find themselves drawn toward historical ones. If there is what Eric Slauter calls an early American “trade gap” between historians and literary schol-ars (“History” 154), there is also a policy of protectionism that renders lit-erary scholarship more historicist and more doubtful of aesthetics than it might otherwise be.

These three factors—antiaesthetic stigma, conceptual ambiguity, and the field’s material conditions—have had a similarly inhibiting effect on the second and more common mode of aesthetic inquiry in our field: that which, regardless of its subject, emphasize literature’s function as artistic or formal expression. Undoubtedly, we continue to generate work that is productively attentive to literary and cultural forms even when its primary interests lie elsewhere. Consider, for example, recent monographs on the alphabet (Crain), nature writing (Hallock), backcountry culture (White), epidemiology (Silva), settlement (Donegan), and sermons (Neuman), to name just a few. Nevertheless, as a field, we now give less priority to textu-ality than to the contexts in which texts are produced and consumed.

It has now been several decades since literary scholars, influenced by the Foucauldian thrust of cultural studies, began to question the special status traditionally afforded to literature relative to other kinds of textual objects—like maps, diaries, polemics, newspaper advertisements, and ac-count books—considering it as both guilty of elitism and limited in its representational significance. This flattening of generic differences turned scholars away from textualist methodologies toward those grounded in the construction of the social, economic, and political histories that give lit-erary texts meaning. Thus, today, for example, work on Charles Brockden Brown’s novel Wieland is much less interested in questions of narrative or novelistic form than in cultural histories of feminism, religious radical-ism, mental illness, law, and incarceration. In privileging historical prox-imity, however, we tend to lose not only a sense of the particularity of the literary but also an understanding of the ways that form can make visible relationships across genres, cultures, and historical periods. Alternatively,


according to Michael Clark, too often “[t]he purpose of reconstructing the historical context is to establish a set of constraints on and expectations for the literary text that limit its meaning to the reproduction of that context” (643). When such reproduced contexts offer innovative frameworks for reading, of course, they make useful contributions to literary studies; but insofar as they predetermine interpretation, they undermine both text and context. Indeed, when they provide little new insight into history itself, they risk turning literary scholars into what Dillon has called “belated, secondhand historians” (“Atlantic Practices” 208).

This shift from textualism to contextualism also implies the reduction of literature to merely another form of discourse—and thus discourages attention to its particular qualities, rules, and expressive capacities. As Phillip Schweighauser writes in a recent “polemic” on aesthetic inquiry in early American studies, “the unfortunate legacy of the New Historicism” is a tendency to “downplay or overlook the differentness of different sign systems” (472). Poems and advertisements may both be studied in terms of their form, of course, but as linguistic artifacts they tend to operate very differently. In one of the field’s earliest inquiries into the relation between aesthetics and historicism, Norman S. Grabo argued that we struggle to “maintain the distinction between the formulative and communicative functions of language” (496). In some ways, then, this challenge reflects a confusion of difference with privilege: in rejecting the specialness or privi-leged status of literature, we have collapsed its distinctive formulative iden-tity with that of all other textual forms as merely communicative. At stake here, of course, is the question of what literature is and does. Does it merely reveal, however richly or inadequately, the historical contexts in which it was produced? Does it participate significantly in the construction of social reality? Does it enable imaginative speculation—the invention of worlds? And by extension: What is the value of such invented worlds to the historian? What should it be to the literary scholar?

These questions—of the status and purpose of literature—are at the heart of what Sacvan Bercovitch described as “the chronically unhappy marriage called literary history” (70). This special issue of Early American Literature presumes neither to offer literary scholars the secret to marital happiness nor to recommend divorce. But it does aim both to invite the field to return to the study of aesthetic forms and cultures and to make aes-thetic evidence more relevant to literary historical scholarship. The essays


herein understand aesthetics as concerned with neither evaluation nor hierarchy, superficiality nor elitism, universalism nor depoliticization. In fact, because the objects of our field typically emerged out of pre- Kantian aesthetic paradigms, they insist on the correlation of aesthetics with poli-tics rather than on the separation of them. Accordingly, these essays illus-trate the extent to which the study of aesthetics enhances our historical understanding of power and difference. They offer historically and politi-cally sensitive revisions of well- known aesthetic traditions. They illuminate the politics of literary form without reactivating the exclusions of an older iteration of literary formalism. And they discover the surprising relevance of pleasure, art, beauty, and imagination to sites of early American culture that would otherwise seem to have neglected or disavowed such ideas.

Such breadth of purpose demands an equally broad definition of aes-thetics—that ever- capacious and unwieldy term. As a provocation to our contributors and readers, we take aesthetics, to adapt Susanne Langer’s in-fluential formulation, as that concerned with the range of meanings com-prehended by the correspondence of feeling and form in social, political, cultural, and natural objects. That is, we assume that all forms are aesthetic insofar as they have the potential to produce feelings in perceiving subjects (or if they have been produced by artists in response to such feelings). At the same time, we contend, all feelings are aesthetic if they emerge in re-sponse to forms (or lead to the production of such forms). Such a defini-tion is meant to be inclusive, but it is also meant to be prescriptive to the extent that it insists on both terms in relation to one another. Thus, such forms as novels, poems, orations, and travel sketches are all aesthetic ob-jects, of course—but so are maps that inspire wonder, diaries that evoke pity, polemics that breed patriotism, newspaper advertisements that trig-ger desire, and even account books that engender boredom. Conversely, we see aesthetics at work in the passion that stimulates a sonnet, the sympathy that spawns a declaration of friendship, and the religious enthusiasm that leads to a confession of faith. Thus, aesthetics is defined not only by privi-lege but also by difference, not only by the status of the subject but also the nature of its experience; and the charge of the literary scholar is to analyze not so much a particular set of objects as a particular phenomenological process.

Scrupulous attention to the literary landscape of feeling and form, we believe, can make us better literary historians. Because the dialogue of feel-


ing and form is so fundamental to human life, aesthetic questions are per-tinent to nearly every kind of social, political, economic, religious, and scientific discourse. Conversely, as George Levine writes: “ideology is so delicately and complexly entangled in the textures of literature itself that no discussion of the ideological without attention to the formal can have any but the most reductive relation to what texts are up to, how they get their work done” (4–5). That work, of course, is complicated. Aesthetic ob-jects sometimes insist on a kind of radical singularity. The subtle, ineffable flashes of meaning that define aesthetic creation or experience often re-sist historicist analysis. To document such phenomena in a way that per-suasively manifests change over time is especially difficult, requiring not only sophisticated hermeneutic skills but flexible notions of evidence that sometimes push up against the conventional limits of validity. But the re-wards of such work are manifold: insight into the shape and consistency of private interiority and public collectivity that defy empirical assessment; the nonrational premises out of which rational thought and action emerge; and the idealist projections that are, for the artist, the only true measures of the real.

Moreover, the singularity of the aesthetic may enable rather than negate historical specificity by challenging master narratives of continuity and bearing witness instead to the kind of particularity, materiality, and imme-diacy favored by current historicist practice. Fortunately, we are aided im-measurably by digital databases and search engines that allow us to make aesthetic arguments based on broad and diverse archives rather than lim-ited examples or idiosyncratic close readings. One might say that such tools invite even more thoroughgoing attention to the formal patterns and structures of feeling that mark our texts and illuminate the early Ameri-can past. As digitally empowered archival formalists, we can now trace the evolution and devolution of poetic figurations, novelistic themes, dramatic devices, and thousands of other aesthetic forms, ideas, and gestures across time more efficiently and effectively than ever before. Indeed, it now seems clear that Roland Barthes was right: “a little formalism turns one away from history, but . . . a lot brings one back to it” (112).

We are undoubtedly literary scholars living in a historicizing and politi-cizing age. This does not mean, however, that the ends of aesthetic inquiry need always be exclusively or even primarily historical and political. As


critics and teachers, we remain committed to the aesthetic interpretation of texts—alert to their wit, profundity, originality, and complexity—for its own sake. This is perhaps especially true for early American writing in all its strangeness, ungainliness, fragmentariness, anxiety, and paranoia. For many of us, these are some of the things that drew us to the field in the first place and that continue to sustain our interest in it after many years. But it is important to remember that they can be realized in their fullness only prior to their identification with ideology or discourse. As Schweig-hauser suggests, in the work of interpreting the aesthetics of any given text we need to hold such ends in abeyance, at least long enough to under-stand its specificity as aesthetics (479–80). If we do, we are far more likely to discover what Frank Shuffelton called the “sublime remainder” of early American writing, those aesthetic aspects of our tradition that “resist our own theorizing” and that are “not reducible to discourses of power or the body” (101).

The essays in this issue, therefore, aim to describe historical change even as they are inspired, to greater and lesser degrees, by elements of feeling and form that resist historicist explanation. Ezra Tawil’s essay returns to one of the foundational books in early American literary history, Perry Miller’s The New England Mind, to revisit our understanding of the role the plain style has played in American literature. Challenging the literary nationalism implicit in Miller’s argument, Tawil reminds us that the plain style had a long and important history in English letters. By bringing the genre of the sentimental novel into the conversation, he addresses funda-mental questions of American literary history, especially around the pur-suit of a specifically American style of writing. In doing so, Tawil takes in-quiry into the aesthetics of sentimental fiction beyond the conventional themes of sympathy and sensibility to explore its investments in “sim-plicity” and “authenticity” and its rejection of excessive ornamentation and “baroque flourishes” (287, 259). That is, he sees in the plain style not a re-jection of aesthetics but a purification of it. Through a series of close read-ings of several of the foundational seduction narratives of early America, including Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple and Hannah Webster Fos-ter’s The Coquette, Tawil shows how Miller’s efforts to render the plain style an American form parallel the efforts by early American writers to pass off their borrowed forms as uniquely American. In this sense, what is specifi-


cally American about early American literature is precisely this gesture of taking manifestly British forms, altering them in various ways, and then claiming them as American.

Abram van Engen’s essay on the significance of aesthetic and moral “disposition” in the sentimental novel similarly shifts our critical focus: in this case, from the genre’s conventional theme of political liberal self- determination to contemporaneous notions of both aesthetic liberty, the ability to take pleasure in things, and “Christian liberty,” “the ability to love and serve God” (300). His analysis begins by observing the centrality of a recurring word in Foster’s The Coquette—“disposition”—one that has far more import than scholars have previously understood. A term of art in both British aesthetic theory and Calvinist theology, disposition is a form of moral identity that lies between the fixed self and the free will and plays a crucial role in shaping an individual’s pleasures and actions. For eighteenth- century writers, it either leads or fails to lead one to “true” plea-sure and virtue. But for theologians like Jonathan Edwards and novelists like Foster, it also names a character’s moral tendency without definitively answering the question of personal culpability. By exploring the nuances of “disposition,” Van Engen demonstrates that the Edwardsian concept of “freedom of the will” circulated not only in elite theological treatises but in far less elite literary forms like the novel. He also reveals how Foster’s text, like others in the sentimental tradition, deftly stages the everyday drama of choice: “how an individual actually goes about making a decision” (304). This essay thus revises the history of sentimentalism by locating pleasure—Eliza’s and that of Foster’s readers—at the root of such concerns and in-sisting on its attraction and instability as foundational to what we tend to think as the far more respectable discourses of politics and religion.

Like the novel, the theater was a significant site for the negotiation of pleasure’s multivalence. Building on the insights of her monograph, Citi-zen Spectator, Wendy Bellion’s essay understands the theater as a space of illusion designed to educate audiences about discernment and dissimu-lation. Examining what she calls “historical practices of looking” (334) in the early national period, she explores how audiences were asked to sus-tain a paradoxical position: taking pleasure in illusion and spectacle, while remembering that their ultimate moral purpose was to hone perceptual skills. To recover this experience of the theater, Bellion contends that we


must examine not only the plots of plays but also the materiality of the space of the theater, which includes the architecture of the building, the constitution of the audience, the spatial layout of the stage, and, most im-portantly, the visual effects that formed such a central part of the spec-tacle. At the same time, she recognizes that the plots of these plays, such as Richard Sheridan’s School for Scandal (1777), Thomas Holcroft’s Duplicity (1781), and David Garrick’s A Peep behind the Curtain (1801), often fore-ground questions of visual knowledge. In this way, her essay offers a ma-terial culture study of the Chestnut Street Theatre focused on the visual experience of attending a performance there. Audiences, actors, and play-wrights engaged in a complex dance that celebrated the pleasure generated by such visual illusions and turned them, at least in theory, into occasions for education and the practice of virtue.

Elizabeth Dillon’s essay, too, explores the social implications of art and its power to create community. But her conception of “aesthesis” main-tains a focus on the process of forming communities of sense rather than on judgments of taste or the circulation of rational discourse in the public sphere. Aesthesis is thus especially suitable to an understanding of Atlantic world cultures that did not share in European aesthetic traditions, or that did so only indirectly and inadvertently, and that had their own traditions of art and communities of sense. In focusing on “books as they change hands between and among Europeans, Native Americans, and enslaved Africans,” Dillon explores the relations between aesthetics and aesthesis, noting that each is interested in both the materiality of objects and their “representational power” (370, 369). As a sensuous artwork, a source of pleasure, a physical manifestation of spiritual power, and the impetus for a community- making experience, the book may have functioned for Native Americans and diasporic Africans as an aesthetic object in a way that chal-lenges long- held assumptions about “premodern” beliefs. In fact, as Dillon observes, such a materialist understanding of the book is, in many ways, consistent with the object- oriented textual practices of European contem-poraries. This notion of a community of sense engendered by the materi-ality of books and other aesthetic objects not only suggests that Europeans and non- Europeans may have possessed a shared idea of aesthetic value in ways we have not yet understood, but it also allows us to see more clearly the ways that idea sometimes differed between the two groups. Dillon’s


essay, then, demonstrates that aesthetic inquiry can be germane to the study of indigenous cultures, and that the study of indigenous cultures can contribute to enriched forms of aesthetic inquiry.

Finally, Christopher Castiglia’s essay uses aesthetic inquiry to explore how “postcritique” scholarship might animate early American literary studies, which he sees as lacking in methodological innovation. Current work, he argues, tends to understand texts largely in relation to their his-torical contexts and thus engenders the illusion of the neutral, disinter-ested scholar and discourages “presentist” interventions. The cost of that distancing is that too often it arrives at predictable conclusions and robs literature of its radical potential. Castiglia’s approach, alternatively, is to see literature’s function not as evidence of historical phenomena but as “an en-actment of imaginative world making” (405). He calls on scholars to “dis-avow” or temporarily suspend the priority of history and historical fact in order to consider what Ernst Bloch calls “the not- yet- real” and the “‘antici-patory illuminations’ of hope” (qtd. in Castiglia 403). This revolutionary power of the imagination was well understood by late eighteenth- century writers. Castiglia shows that in Leanora Sansay’s novel The Secret History, literature not only “reflects” historical events but also has a “metonymic and prior relation to revolution” (409). By shifting his critical focus from Mary, the novel’s rational narrator, to her more aesthetically minded sister, Clara, he reveals the powerful structuring force of the latter’s “visionary imagination” (412). He draws clarifying connections between the novel’s unstable aesthetic contrasts—of reason and passion, virtue and pleasure, and so on—and its understanding of both the Haitian Revolution and the dynamics of revolutionary imagining. In this way, Castiglia demonstrates that The Secret History functions “as a commentary on the operations of literature itself ” (410).

Together these essays are meant to inspire a more coherent and focused investigation into the potential significance of aesthetics in our critical practice than we have had in the past. They point to some crucial areas for further exploration, including the formal complexity of the early Ameri-can novel; the relationship between aesthetics and such categories as reli-gion, politics, material culture, and intellectual history; and what we might call the speculative force of fictionality. We readily acknowledge, however, that the collection is hardly representative of the field’s current scope of interest. It includes no sustained considerations of seventeenth- century


authors or of poetry, and it overprivileges both the genre of the novel and the period of the late eighteenth century. Perhaps most regrettably, it offers no discussions of literary works by African- Americans or Native Ameri-cans. These conspicuous absences are certainly not due to a lack of inter-est on our part, but rather to a paucity of submissions on those topics. It may be, as we suggest above, that because aesthetic ideology was partly responsible for obscuring and devaluing nonwhite writers’ contributions to early American literature, turning to an aesthetic analysis of their work might seem like an inherently hostile gesture designed to exclude or, at least, marginalize them. Our hope, however, is that a more historically and politically engaged understanding of aesthetics will lessen such suspicions and enable scholars to appreciate and explore the aesthetic dimensions of texts by writers of diverse social, racial, and ethnic backgrounds. We might then move past this first hurdle to consider more carefully the particular difficulties of treating a critical discourse that was often unavailable to the writers in question—or recovering one that may not be readily intelligible to us.7

In spite of these limitations, this special issue aims to inspire a field-wide conversation about aesthetics, what it means, and how attention to its concepts, histories, theories, and techniques can enhance our scholarship, historicist and otherwise. To begin this conversation, we have asked three scholars whose work engages with aesthetics, Russ Castronovo, Philip Gould, and Lauren Klein, to respond to the essays that follow in ways that point it in productive directions. Their brief but incisive remarks confirm our belief that a historically and politically sensitive approach to questions of feeling and form promises to revitalize the field in multiple ways. They suggest that aesthetics can not only alert us to neglected objects and dis-cern their subtlest textures, revise key paradigms of intellectual and artis-tic history, and demonstrate the power of the literary imagination to effect revolutionary change, but that it can also provide robust analytical tools to explore the otherwise elusive regimes of perception and systems of repre-sentation that are at the very heart early American and Atlantic world life. As Klein argues, aesthetics can help us more effectively to see whatever we turn our critical gaze upon, especially those sites of experience most re-sistant to being seen. Rather than insisting on the prospect of a definitive “aesthetic turn” for our field, then, we hope that this special issue and the dialogue it inspires will lead to a more informed, focused, and sustained


pursuit of aesthetic inquiry in ways that make it integral to the future of early American literary studies in all its range and diversity.

nOTes

1. In fact, even though Miller taught in the English Department at Harvard, which was then the Department of the History of English and American Literature, he is often claimed by historians as one of their own. For an excellent example of this phenomenon see Morgan.

2. See, for example, the work of Bourdieu and Smith. 3. For recent accounts of the politics of aesthetics in American literary studies gen-

erally, see Weinstein and Looby; and Castiglia and Castronovo. 4. The panel on “emotions” usefully exemplifies how “affect studies,” which has its

origins in disciplines for which aesthetics is not especially relevant, has in some ways come to stand in for aesthetics in literary studies. Yet with the notable ex-ception of Tennenhouse’s recent book, affect studies in our field (and other fields, for that matter) has devoted little attention to literary form. More typically, it understands the constitution of politics, community, race, gender, class, and other sociological and historical categories as a matter of discourse rather than of repre-sentation.

5. Lest we conclude too rapidly that this relative absence was a product of the col-laboration and compromise with our colleagues in history, it should be noted that the situation was not dramatically different at the previous Society of Early Ameri-canists conference in 2013. Out of eighty panels, only three were devoted to poetry, three to landscape, two to fiction, and two to textual “front and back matter,” while others considered such topics as “Milton,” “religious affections,” “tourism,” the “aesthetics of colonial chemistry,” “native texualities,” “graphic narrative,” and “global desire.”

6. In 2000, the McNeil Center awarded two postdoctoral fellowships and eight dis-sertation fellowships, and 2014 it awarded six postdocs and fifteen dissertation fellowships. The American Antiquarian Society did not offer long- term fellow-ships until 2002, when it awarded two postdocs sponsored by the National En-dowment for the Humanities; in 2014, it gave four postdocs and three dissertation fellowships. The Library Company began offering long- term fellowships in 2004, when it sponsored three dissertation fellowships, and in 2014 it awarded four post-docs and four dissertation fellowships. In the meantime, the Omohundro Institute has remained steady at two to three postdocs per year (some for two- year periods and some for one year). In sum, in 2000 there were ten postdocs and eight dis-sertation fellowships available from these institutions, whereas in 2014 there were seventeen postdocs and twenty- two dissertation fellowships—a dramatic 150 per-cent increase.


7. For a recent discussion of the prospects for aesthetic inquiry in Native American cultures, see Calcaterra.

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