From the time American literature began to assume discernible outlines in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, writers and critics have pondered the extent to which democracy as a political institution has affected literary expression in the United States. What would be the effects upon literature of the new republic’s grand egalitarian experiment? In separate conversations, Cushing Strout and R. Jackson Wilson offer some answers and insights.
In considering democracy as a literary institution, Cushing Strout refers to the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville (1771-1862), who asked how radical egalitarianism would affect America’s literature and poetry. Strout addresses de Tocqueville’s prophecies and how they fit into modernist literary theory beginning in the 1940s.
In the second segment [15:00], Wilson discusses authorship, patronage, and the public in the United States between 1771 and 1862. American literature exhibits a disparity between a professed poetical egalitarianism and the inequities of race and society that are apparent in practical terms to writers and poets.
At the time of these conversations, Strout, a Fellow at the National Humanities Center (1984-85), was professor of American studies at Cornell University.
Wilson, a Fellow at the Center (1984-85), was professor of history at Smith College.
This edition of Soundings was conducted by Wayne J. Pond.
