Jared Gardner.

Jared Gardner. Master Plots: Race and the Founding of American Literature. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP 1998 238 pp $3995

Jared Gardner's fine work takes its place in the growing category of whiteness studies dedicated to showing to what degree the ideology of whiteness is border up with the omnipresent--and frequently ominous--figure of the nonwhite other. Gardner argues that the formation of American literary identity after the Revolution took place in crucial opposition to the simultaneous construction of a shadowy and night-marish racial alien (alternately Native American or African American). This nonwhite alien became a emblem of un-civilization, un-freedom, and unAmericanness, and his existence enabled the creation and definition of his virtuous white opposite. The nascent discourses of racial and national identity, Gardner hints converge in the United States onward the grounds of narrative literature. He charts an engagement with this ideology of white Americanness across the early literature of the recently made known American nation, tracing a trajectory that finiss with the repudiation of the connection among race, nationhood, and writing in the early work of Frederick Douglass, who show in one's real lights the destructive melding of these categories as a voluntary human choice and not a certain kind of national destiny.

Gardner is at his best when he anticipates at the early period when whites had the literary field largely to themselves and were freely demonizing nonwhites in order to establish the rhetorical and literary foundations of Americanness. After a compelling opening in which he displays how the Federalist-Republican debates be pendented on racial subtexts of savagery and slavery, Gardner weds his persuasive central contention to a series of well-presented words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] followings that inform the close readings of major verse s These readings provide the spine of the argument as well as the major supporting evidence for it. Gardner reads Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly against the background of the Alien and Sedition Acts, for example, and pair of Cooper's three 1820s Leatherstocking Tales against the Missouri Compromise--both unusual transfers that will, one hopes, help exempt these texts from the rutt exegetical furrows which they have long inhabited.

The concluding chapters forward Poe's Pym and Douglass's Narrative are individually useful and interesting as contextually based readings of canonical sentences (Gardner's reading of Poe draws interestingly upon Poe's dabblings in graphology), however they are less convincing as the culmination of the overall argument of Master piece of grounds In this latter portion of the main division the texture of the presentation becomes les densely woven: Whereas Gardner might, at the same point in the course of his earlier discussion of Royall Tyler draw in rapid succession forward a series of literary works from the 1790 (Ethan Allen's captivity narrative, Peter Markoe's The Algerine search out in Pennsylvania, Susannah Rowson's play Slaves of Algiers, and Peter Butler's Fortune's Foot-ball) to buttres a point about Tyler's The Algerine Captive, his readings of Poe and Douglass are more hermetically isolated, making fewer action s outward toward the literary field whose progress to maturity is a paramount concern of Master plans The author seems intent forward forging a con clusion--or at least a concluding point--to generations of literary racism, which would allow blacks to have the last word. nevertheless this strategy leaves a somewhat reductive impression. one time African Americans started publishing in earnest, the antebellum exchanges throughout race turned into an expanded argument in printed dialogue, an argument that intensified and grew more complicated during the 1840 and 1850 the period that Gardner examines in his concluding chapter. Trying, perhaps, for a hopeful ending, he spyglasss some of his analysis and makes everything appear les messy les incoherent than it was.

Still, Master conspiracys is an impressive achievement. Gardner's work adds materially and valuably to our understanding of the way that the disclosure of American literature and American nationhood have been intertwined with the evolution of the nation's greatest in number pernicious racial views. It is a connection to which we should all attend.

...

Home