This brief essay addresses this volume’s multiple audiences – including undergraduate and graduate students; instructors who want to incorporate a new unit on Reconstruction into a colonial and US literature survey course or to teach a class on the subject; and scholars of American literature who might or might not work in the second half of the nineteenth century – who would benefit from a basic map to the significant changes now in progress in Reconstruction studies and strategies for teaching them. Within the past decade in particular, renewed and transformative interest in Reconstruction has moved to the forefront of the fields of US history and nineteenth-century US literary history. While the Reconstruction period has long been a staple in the field of US history (however troubled that narrative might have been, a topic to which I will turn shortly), that has notably not been the case in the field of literary studies. As Gordon Hutner points out in his introduction to the 2018 special issue of the flagship field journal American Literary History entitled “Reenvisioning Reconstruction,” Reconstruction has been “among the subjects least touched” by scholars otherwise energetically focused on revising field assumptions and canons. Scholarship to remedy this stark neglect and debates about how to do so have recently risen to the top of the disciplinary agenda. As Hutner puts it, “A nucleus of scholars has been revisiting the period and committing a great deal of industry and intelligence toward uncovering its critical exigencies in ways that previous generations of Americanists had missed.”1

American literary histories have long presented realism as the “major” or “great movement” of the postbellum period. According to this narrative, William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Mark Twain towered over the era as its “major realists,” with the year 1885 standing as the “annus mirabilis” that saw the publication of The Rise of Silas Lapham, The Bostonians (serialized that year in The Century Magazine), and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. (Designating 1885 to be “a year of wonders” itself speaks to the chronological exceptionalism that undergirds this narrative.) In more recent decades, scholarship has turned to extending the story of realism backward in time (e.g., to Rebecca Harding Davis) and simultaneously to expanding its canon to include a more diverse array of writers, including women (especially regionalists such as Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman) and writers of color (such as Zitkala-Ŝa). Nevertheless, realism has remained a mostly genre-exclusive conception that leaves poetry out of the story. My argument here breaks with the long scholarly tradition of dissociating poetry from realism. I argue that an active strain of realist writing not only by women, but by women poets in particular, evolved in the decades following the Civil War. Common in print culture by the 1870s, women's realist poems helped to shape the literary climate for the later and better-known projects of their fellow realists working in fiction.

The term “realism” is one of the most troubled keywords in American literary history, rendering terminological ground-clearing especially necessary. Michael Davitt Bell argues that the term “realism,” both during the postbellum era and in twentieth-century scholarship about it, is consistently plagued by problems of definition. Nancy Glazener demonstrates that culturally authoritative magazines promoted “realism” as a literary quality that readers should “read for,” even though any precise definition remained slippery at best. For present purposes, I adopt a necessarily brief working gloss that incorporates key points of consensus in both postbellum discourses and in twentieth-century scholarship: realism is a mode of literary writing that seeks to represent contemporary social reality in a way that entails accurate observations of commonplace events, characters, and settings and that does so without recourse to transcendental frames of reference as a foundation. I present a selected group of realist poems by four women, published between 1872 and 1889.

The field of nineteenth-century poetry in the USA – and of women's poetry in particular – is now one of the most lively, active, and exciting areas of Americanist scholarship. A pressing need to clear out the ideological residue of twentieth-century literary criticism, which typically derided nineteenth-century women's poetry as trite, sentimental pablum, has driven innovation on many fronts. The first wave of scholarly attention to nineteenth-century US women poets grew from the related phenomena of feminist studies and the canon wars. Emily Stipes Watts (The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945 [1977]); Erlene Stetson (Black Sister: Poetry by Black American Women, 1746–1980 [1981]); Cheryl Walker (The Nightingale's Burden: Women Poets and American Culture Before 1900 [1982]); and Alicia Ostriker (Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America [1986]) all called powerful attention to the extensive and (at that time) entirely neglected body of work by women poets. Scholars today still build on the ground these pioneering scholars cleared, but are simultaneously recasting the field's fundamental terms of inquiry. In the pages that follow, I offer a brief overview of the emergence and development of nineteenth-century American women's poetry studies; I then turn to addressing the problems at the core of the field at the present time.

The terms “poetry” and “realism” have a complex and mostly oppositional relationship in American literary histories of the post-Civil War era. The conventional account holds that realism, the major literary “movement” of the era, developed apace in prose fiction, while poetry, stuck in a hopelessly idealist late-Romantic mode, languished and stagnated. By this all too-familiar account, American poetry produced little of value between Whitman and Dickinson and the modernists. Poetry is thus almost entirely absent from scholarship on American realism except as the emblem of realism's opposite: a desiccated genteel tradition. The long life of this tale in twentieth-century criticism has afforded it, until very recently, factual status, but its core elements did not in fact arise retrospectively from an impartial scholarly distance. Rather, the twentieth-century critics who promulgated this account reproduced the elements of a story already circulating during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In the pages that follow, I will trace the narrative that poetry was in its “twilight” as it emerged in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, serving a particular ideology of poetry among elite poets and in highbrow literary periodicals; I will also argue that poetic counter-discourses in the era itself invalidate the standard narratives about postbellum poetry and its relation to realism.

Nancy Glazener has penetratingly argued that “realism” was an institutional product of a cluster of highbrow periodicals she calls “the Atlantic Group.” The “twilight of the poets” also became a lively topic circulating in this elite literary sphere. After Edmund Clarence Stedman published the term in 1885, it spread rapidly through literary culture and became an almost instant catchphrase, a sensationalist coin that writers enjoyed trading amidst their broader discussions about the degraded literary status, or status in general, of the modern era.

In 1876, The Johns Hopkins University invented the Ph.D. degree that we know today. Both Yale and Harvard had previously awarded doctorates, but they had done so in scant numbers, without programmatic initiative or direction. By 1873, Yale had awarded 90 percent of American Ph.D.s, with an anemic total of twenty-three. The M.A. degree had been more common, but it, too, was an aimless degree awarded without systematic training or clear social purpose. A quip current at Harvard through 1869 reported that you could get the M.A. there for “keeping out of jail five years and paying five dollars.” Simply put, graduate school in the United States had no social meaning. Hopkins transformed the pursuit of an advanced degree from an arcane and marginal academic exercise into a necessary and competitive credential for a new profession: the scholar-expert. The Ph.D. scholar-expert became the Hopkins brand. Inspired by the nineteenth-century German conception of pure research, the Hopkins doctorate certified the Ph.D.'s rigorous training, his ability to pursue original investigation, and his capacity to reproduce his professional skills in subsequent generations of advanced students. Within fifteen years of Hopkins' inception, its Ph.D. model had thoroughly saturated and altered the landscape of American higher education, indeed becoming so hegemonic that its revolutionary freshness in the 1870s is now hard to imagine.

Every institution of higher education in the nation had to contend with the Hopkins Ph.D. as a new social force.

How does a topic – any topic – become a school subject? And how does a given subject find its place in the school system? What factors render it appropriate to a particular grade level, kind of school, brand of teacher, or type of student? The answers to these questions vary from one subject and one era to another. Indeed, every subject has its own curricular history. Individual curricular subjects in turn comprise a larger knowledge category that we typically refer to as “the curriculum.” While, in its most rudimentary sense, this term designates a school's regular course of study, the historical phenomenon of the curriculum is not regular but variable and contingent. Curricula might or might not vary from school to school within and across specific time periods. The changing historical incarnations of the curriculum serve as what Richard Hofstadter and C. DeWitt Hardy call “a barometer by which we may measure the cultural pressures that operate upon the school.” In the pages that follow, I trace the history of one curricular subject in particular. Although still most commonly known as “American literature,” that designation is now on the brink of change. In that sense, this book frames both the beginning and the end of “American literature” in the curriculum.

Although elementary and high school curricula widely offered American literature by the late nineteenth century, colleges and universities typically resisted its encroachment on the curriculum until the mid-twentieth century.

The Ohio Agricultural and Mechanical College, later renamed The Ohio State University, opened in 1873 to educate “the industrial classes,” as the Morrill Act of 1862 had authorized. Inaugurating the land-grant college movement, The Morrill Act revolutionized higher education by transforming both the nature of its curriculum and the demographics of its student population. While the traditional classical curriculum held that the mental exercise involved in learning Greek and Latin trained the mind in an inherently valuable way, land-grant educators criticized the classics as useless, advocating the idea that the college curriculum should serve practical utility. And while the traditional classical colleges served a socially elite population, Morrill charged the land-grant schools to provide higher education to a sector of the population that had never before had such access. Put into practice, these two innovations carved out a new school model that competed with dramatic success in the chaotic late-nineteenth-century world of higher education.

The new idea of practical higher education for the mass of American youth aggressively changed the social function of the curriculum. College education was no longer presumed to serve elite male students seeking admission to the learned professions. Now both male and female students from all social spheres, including even the sons of dirt farmers presumably headed back to the family farm, had access to a form of higher education that claimed to serve their specific vocational needs.

The emergence of video-game studies as a new kind of college and university program provides one current illustration of the ways that the curricular canon repeatedly redefines knowledge. A broad sector of the adult American public views the world of video gaming as a mindless, distracting, and perhaps even dangerous form of recreation that opposes, rather than embodies, what we hope to teach. Those who hold a competing view see gaming as a deeply engaging and stimulating form of fun and even as a new mode of critical thinking. We live in the transformative moment in which the cultural uncertainty about the meaning of video games is moving toward resolution by tipping them into the curriculum. Once they become curricular in a more widespread fashion, they will achieve knowledge status, and the terms of the present debate about their value will shift once again.

A century ago, the identity of American literature was undergoing a kindred process of cultural flux. Its image, too, was initially antithetical to the very idea of a higher curriculum. This conception held that American literature lacked seriousness; its materials were too chronologically close to current life to warrant scholarly treatment; it had no academic pedigree; people enjoyed reading it, so it didn't require attention in school; grade-school kids could understand it, so it didn't merit college status; and college students, when you let them have it, consumed it enthusiastically. Surely no subject with those qualities belonged in higher education.

As the research university with its Ph.D. credential spread throughout American higher education, it coexisted, often uneasily, with competing educational models. Of course, it was only from a later historical vantage that the outcome of these contests would become clear. No one could have known in 1876 that within 15 years the research model would thoroughly redefine American higher education. During this era of flux, one intense form of institutional competition transpired between the new research university and the traditional old-style female seminary, a common form of the school in the United States before the Civil War. The female seminary trained young women to become teachers, mostly for lower schools but also for the female seminaries themselves. Female seminary teachers taught a prescribed curriculum of the kind they had themselves learned, acting as conduits of textbook knowledge for students who would go on, as teachers, to replicate the same pedagogy. This model of the teacher faced new and previously unimaginable pressures in the last decades of the nineteenth century. By that time, Johns Hopkins was redefining college teachers as credentialized experts and putting forth its new style of “seminary” pedagogy. The purpose of the Hopkins “seminary” was of course not to produce lower-level teachers who would transmit standard textbook knowledge, but rigorously to train new generations of knowledge experts who would produce the next wave of original research. In the postbellum battle between these opposed seminary models, the old-style seminary would become one of the institutional casualties of the era.

Located in the small town of Xenia in western Ohio, Wilberforce University was founded in 1856 with an aim almost inconceivable at the time: to provide higher education for “Negroes.” A decade later, the cataclysmic social changes of the post-emancipation period would generate a surge in the number of Negro colleges, universities, and normal schools, hundreds of which were founded between 1865 and 1900. These schools attempted to succeed in an ideological climate that primarily supported two kinds of Negro education: training in manual labor and training as teachers, specifically as teachers for other Negroes. In the parlance of the time, “industrial,” “manual,” “trade,” “vocational,” “agricultural,” “mechanical,” and “normal” education were kinds of training considered suitable for black students, part of a larger effort to train them for subordinate positions in American society. This chapter will show how the installation of American literature at Wilberforce University enacted the social programs meant to limit curricula, jobs, and status for black people.

The programmatic location for American literature at Wilberforce was the normal program, and its social function as a subject was of a piece with the normal curriculum that housed it: to train teachers for lower-level Negro schools. It was not the content of the American literature classes but their institutional location that acted as the lens through which they acquired meaning.