This multi-volume History marks a new beginning in the study of American literature. The first Cambridge History of American Literature (1917) helped introduce a new branch of English writing. The Literary History of the United States, assembled thirty years later under the aegis of Robert E. Spiller, helped establish a new field of academic study. This History embodies the work of a generation of Americanists who have redrawn the boundaries of the field. Trained in the 1960s and early 1970s, representing the broad spectrum of both new and established directions in all branches of American writing, these scholars and critics have shaped, and continue to shape, what has become a major area of modern literary scholarship.

Over the past three decades, Americanist literary criticism has expanded from a border province into a center of humanist studies. The vitality of the field is reflected in the rising interest in American literature nationally and globally, in the scope of scholarly activity, and in the polemical intensity of debate. Significantly, American texts have come to provide a major focus for inter- and cross-disciplinary investigation. Gender studies, ethnic studies, and popular-culture studies, among others, have penetrated to all corners of the profession, but perhaps their single largest base is American literature. The same is true with regard to controversies over multiculturalism and canon formation: the issues are transhistorical and transcultural, but the debates themselves have often turned on American books.

When John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–92) published his first poem in 1826, Carlos Wilcox and John Brainard were still alive; when he published his last poem in 1892, Robert Frost was in high school and Ezra Pound was seven years old. No other poet of the American nineteenth century spans such distances or wrote in such varied styles. Whittier was a lover of New England landscape and traditional lore; he was a political activist, whose poems were meant to awaken consciences; he was an exuberant satirist; he was a Quaker whose verse spoke of forbearance and faith. For more than thirty years he was involved in the struggle against slavery, as an active member of both local and national anti-slavery parties. The events of the day kept him well supplied with topics for verse – sometimes the cruelties of slaveholders, more often the collusion of the Northern businessmen with the anti-abolition mobs who pelted him and his friends with rotten eggs, sticks, and light missiles when they tried to hold public meetings to discuss slavery. He could write about the rotten eggs with amusement, but not about the menace to civil liberties offered by the 1835 pro-slavery meeting in Boston's Faneuil Hall, where (to use Whittier's words) “a demand was made for the suppression of free speech, lest it should endanger the foundations of commercial society,” or by Governor Edward Everett's inaugural message in 1836, which urged citizens to abstain from any discussion of slavery. This address drew from Whittier an outraged question addressed to Everett in the Haverhill Gazette: “Is this the advice of a republican magistrate to a community of freemen?” Or, as he put it in “Stanzas for the Times” (1835), must the Yankee farmer “be told, beside his plough, / What he must speak, and when, and how?”

LOCAL-COLOR POETRY

Is there a local-color poetry, corresponding to the prose that emerged in the decades following the Civil War? The genre of poetry in itself moves representation away from the realism strongly associated with regionalism. What finds expression in prose as concrete, detailed description and psychologized portraiture, is pushed in poetry towards stylization of character and setting, and a balladic treatment of narrative – with or without dialogue, represented speech, and dialect. This generic difference allows impulses and issues to become visible, which are perhaps obscured in features specific to fiction and discussions of them. The very definition of the “local” and its meanings within post-bellum American culture takes on a distinctive color when approached through its poetic representations.

“Regionalism” seems increasingly partial as a term for the literature(s) of diversity which emerged towards the nineteenth century's end. Yet characterizing this literary diversity is in some sense as challenging as characterizing the diversity of America generally. The term “region” was itself undergoing dynamic change of meaning in the post-Civil War era, within a newly reconceived nationality. But geography stands as only one of a number of differentiations becoming newly evident, or evident in new ways, within American cultural development. These include not only emerging senses of diverse locations, but also of languages, especially dialects, of religious, racial, and ethnic affiliations – both in terms of new immigrations and the newly emerging status of the black freedmen – as well as a new self-consciousness regarding gender definitions.

Rhetoric is the art of making claims. As such, it has often been suspected of being narrowly strategic and interested, if not distorting. But it can also be claimed that, instead of only putting forward some particular argument, rhetoric broadly structures experience in so far as this is mediated by language and expressed through language. To study rhetoric is then to study fundamental patterns in a culture, as made evident and pursued through its varied discourses. In this sense, rhetoric provides a site where literature intersects with other forms of discourse, and not least public ones. The rhetorical modes of a culture penetrate literary representation, while literature derives its materials through such rhetorical matrices, but in ways that are more self-conscious, self-reflective, and directed to its own ends.

The study of nineteenth-century American poetry confirms the mutual reference between literary work and other modes of rhetoric. In the nineteenth century, poetry had a vibrant and active role within ongoing discussions defining America and its cultural directions. The notion of poetry as a self-enclosed aesthetic realm; constituted as a formal object to be approached through more or less exclusively specified categories of formal analysis; conceived as meta-historically transcendent; and deploying a distinct and poetically “pure” language: these notions seem only to begin to emerge at the end of the nineteenth century, in a process which is itself peculiarly shaped in response to social and historical no less than aesthetic trends. Within the course of the nineteenth century itself, such an enclosed poetic realm seems not to have been assumed, except as an anxiety and as a looming threat within American culture itself. Instead, poetry directly participated in and addressed the pressing issues facing the new nation.

For someone who has not entered the pages of history as an opera composer, Mendelssohn's output of dramatic music was remarkable, and the attention attracted by his failure to complete a mature opera is unparalleled. To describe the first and explain the second are the objects of this chapter.

Had Beethoven and Schumann died, like Mendelssohn, at the age of thirty-eight, the lack of Fidelio (completed by Beethoven at the age of forty-four in 1814) or Genoveva (Schumann was forty at the 1850 premiere) would hardly have affected their final evaluation by posterity. Why is it, then, that Mendelssohn's unfulfilled operatic ambitions were considered such a significant – and suggestive – artistic failure? Two reasons come immediately to mind: first, had Mendelssohn lived only a year longer – as his contemporaries were acutely aware – the world might have witnessed the completion of Die Lorelei, an opera that occupied much of his creative energy in the months before his death. Other projects were in the queue, such as a commission for Her Majesty's Theatre in London, which had not reached fruition in time for the 1847 season, but which could well have seen the light of day the following year.

In the case of a composer like Mendelssohn, it is not easy to claim that a certain part of his oeuvre is more important than another: it was his avowed goal to be active and successful in as many different musical genres as possible, and – with the single exception of opera – he achieved just this. Nevertheless, it can be said that the mature chamber works of Mendelssohn rank not only among the finest works of the composer, but among those achievements of his that were of lasting importance for the entire century. The techniques of motivic combination, derivation, juxtaposition, and interplay that characterize his mature chamber style, which arose from Mendelssohn's fascination with the music of both Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig Beethoven, exercised a considerable influence on nineteenth-century instrumental music in general; it is hardly an exaggeration to claim that the technique of “developing variation” has its roots precisely here. Furthermore, their sheer beauty and highly idiomatic writing for all instruments have secured a place in the performance repertoire and the recording market for at least some of these works – particularly the two piano trios and some of the string quartets.

In 1974 the distinguished musicologist Carl Dahlhaus published an edited volume called The Mendelssohn Problem: Das Problem Mendelssohn. The book's preface makes reference to the recent increase in attention to the composer in scholarly as well as performing venues, abetted by the 125th anniversary of his death in 1972. To speak of a Mendelssohn renaissance, Dahlhaus emphasizes in his opening sentence, would be a great exaggeration. This gambit would be equally valid today. The title of this 1974 volume – as Dahlhaus must have known when he chose it – raises the red flags of several controversies and confusions, which have likewise remained unresolved in the intervening thirty years. Immediately, it conjures a rhetorical, ideological, and political parallel: the Mendelssohn problem, “the Jewish problem.” If, in other words, there is a “problem” with Mendelssohn the man or with Mendelssohn the music, the titular phrase works only in the shadow of the larger cultural issue. Is Mendelssohn a minor composer? In the present context we must bracket the question. We would not expect ever to read a book about the Puccini problem, the Mascagni problem, or the Rimsky-Korsakov problem. The Meyerbeer problem, perhaps. But that is the point. It is the abiding cultural anxiety of anti-Semitism or about anti-Semitism that casts an aura over these nineteenth-century composers, fusing and confusing the judgments of their cultural and aesthetic validity. Before 1960 and his elevation to canonic status, Gustav Mahler would likely have appeared as the third man in the group.

The relation between Mendelssohn's works and the music of the past has preoccupied musicians, critics, and scholars since their first performances. During his lifetime, the view emerged that Mendelssohn's engagement with early music was a defining aspect of his creativity, and confronting this facet of his activities remains central to understanding his works and their significance. Successive generations have, of course, responded in different ways to Mendelssohn's compositional historicism, yet for much of the period from the 1840s to the 1960s it provided a focus for negative assessments of his output: even today, some scholars – disconcerted by the sheer extent of the composer's investment in the past – represent his responses to earlier music as fabricated musical kitsch. In general, however, our post-modern sensibilities are more sympathetic to Mendelssohn's achievement. There is, after all, an essential kinship between his concerns and our own (ironically, the current enthusiasm for his choral works was stimulated by a distinctively postmodern form of historicism, historically informed performance). Indeed, it could be claimed that, in this regard, Mendelssohn was the first composer of modernity: the first musician to wrestle with the dilemma of being dispossessed of a lingua franca.

It is impossible to separate any discussion of approaches to the performance of the music of Felix Mendelssohn (and therefore conducting Mendelssohn) from the thorny and troubled history of the reception of Mendelssohn's music since his death in 1847. The dynamics of listening are such that when a performer is determined to make a case for the music that is at odds with a reigning albeit reductive sense of a composer's aesthetic, audience expectations will offer resistance. Whether a conductor implicitly or explicitly concedes an established construct of Mendelssohn or not, a particular set of prejudices is present, derived from the standard account of Mendelssohn in music history. In that standard view Mendelssohn is distinct, in terms of surface, sound, and meaning, from Wagner and late Romanticism. This assumption of a stark contrast between Wagner and Mendelssohn concedes the Wagnerian version of the development of nineteenth-century music. The consequences are that one should not expect to hear nearly so radical a disjunction in basic performance practices and sound between Mendelssohn and, for example, Beethoven and Schubert. Yet the audience expects such a contrast when it comes to Wagner, vindicating the idea that Wagner's music and aesthetic contain a stark originality. This may apply as well in a subordinate way to Liszt. The self-justifying rhetoric of the “new” German school has been integrated into our approach to performance. Wagner and Liszt have been set apart from their predecessors by succeeding generations in a manner that suggests a fundamental paradigm shift, requiring a different approach to performance.

Sir Donald Francis Tovey declared,

Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy completed eleven works in the genre of solo instrument(s) and orchestra. Spanning more than two decades, they range from the thirteen-year-old's little-known Concerto for Piano and Strings in A minor, composed in 1822, to one of Mendelssohn's most popular works, the Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in E minor op. 64 (1845). Examined together as a group, they reveal a fascinating trajectory, manifesting a terrific growth in imagination and inventiveness. These works run the gamut from rather insecure and uneven student pieces to a great, confident masterpiece, through light-hearted, quickly dashed off virtuosic showpieces, to deeply introspective, rarified musical statements.

In only one other specific genre, that of the string quartet, did the composer work as consistently throughout his life as he did at the compositions of concertos. And this was not an easy task. As R. Larry Todd notes,

Orchestral music in Mendelssohn's career

The symphony occupies a remarkably limited place in Mendelssohn's oeuvre. Because he published just two symphonies – one a work of his sixteenth year and the other only after a fourteen-year incubation – one might well imagine that the anxiety of Beethoven's influence overwhelmed him. Certainly, Mendelssohn's history with the symphony demonstrates his intense self-criticism and even self-doubt. It also reflects other factors, however, including his schedule of professional activities and his restless compositional imagination.

Mendelssohn was the most influential and widely admired orchestral composer of his generation. His experience with the orchestral repertoire of both eighteenth-century masters and his contemporaries gave him an unerring sense for original and imaginative structures. His gift for musical characterization, manifest in his concert overtures, captured an aspect of Romanticism in a way that appealed equally to unsophisticated listeners and to critics, whether progressive or conservative. And in a few works he explored the possibilities of complex narrative in music.

The apprentice sinfonias to Symphony no. 1 (1821–1824)

Mendelssohn gained his orchestral mastery through rigorous study. Karl Friedrich Zelter’s tutelage brooked no shirking of assignments in harmonization, elementary forms, and rigorous counterpoint in a tradition extending back to J. S. Bach. After about two years of these studies Mendelssohn began to work in full-scale compositions in more complex forms.

Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize winning 1986 graphic novel Maus follows the artist's father, Vladek, through the early years of World War II, tracing the events that culminate in his 1944 arrival at Auschwitz. Though striking in its sense of documentary rigor, the book is animated by a visual conceit that comprises its sole glaring concession to fantasy: Jews are portrayed as mice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs, Americans as dogs. Though not without its hazards, the image of the Jew as mouse succeeds not only in essentializing the war's governing chain of predatorship, but in encapsulating a broad understanding of the Jews' position among northern Europe's citizenry: mice inhabit walls, having no rooms of their own, consigned to an intersticial realm at once enclosed and excluded by its architectural surroundings. The mouse serves as a shorthand figure for both the Jews' perspective on the world and the anxiety they inspired.

Felix Mendelssohn has proven one of music history's great wall-dwellers. And without wishing to trivialize Spiegelman's subject matter, I suggest that his metaphor might prove a useful point of entry into the essays that follow. Over the last half-century, it has become increasingly customary to see Mendelssohn's life (once thought thoroughly placid) and art (once thought transparently unchallenging) as deeply problematic indeed – the 1974 publication of the provocatively titled essay collection Das Problem Mendelssohn was a key moment in this reevaluation. The anxiety Mendelssohn inspires is rooted largely in the peculiar tendency of his life, his career, and his music to make us aware of crucial borders at the same time that he crosses and re-crosses them.