Essays paint picture of America

A NEW LITERARY HISTORY OF AMERICA. Edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors. Harvard University Press. 1,095 pages. $49.95.

It begins with the first time the name "America" appears on a published map and finishes with artist Kara Walker's graphic response to the election of the 44th president of the United States, Barack Obama.

Such guideposts hint at just what is so different and, frankly, refreshing about this particular volume edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors. With a title such as "A New Literary History of America," readers might expect a series of brief essays hitting all the high points of what has become canonical American literature. However, the 218 essays collected by Marcus and Sollors emphatically announce another project altogether.

The Winchester rifle, the Roanoke colony, the Book of Mormon, Thomas Cole's landscapes, Jim Crow, Charles Audubon, the Alamo, the invention of the blues, Alexander Graham Bell's experiments in telephony, the word "multicultural," Superman, Alcoholics Anonymous.

This laundry list of people, places, events and things points to just some of the ticks on the timeline charted by this expansive but engaging work.

Though readers will find the no-doubt obligatory essays on seminal American works such as "Moby Dick," Uncle Tom's Cabin," "The Last of the Mohicans," "The Scarlet Letter," etc., this literary historical project takes a much wider view of just what, properly speaking, we consider as the province of literature and its relationship to the larger cultural sphere.

"The goal of the book," as Marcus and Sollors note in their introduction, "is not to smash a canon or create a new one, but to set many forms of American speech in motion, so that different forms, and people speaking at different times in sometimes radically different ways, can be heard speaking to each other." And largely their effort succeeds, no doubt aided by the form and focus of the essays themselves.

Though published by Harvard, very few of the essays take on an overly academic or pedantic tone. More suggestive of call and response, not definitive pronouncement, the essays do not come across as argumentative or in any way attempting to settle some literary score. Rather, more often than not, contributors revel in their enthusiasm, responding to their particular literary or cultural object personally and, refreshingly, personably.

While many of the contributors to "A New Literary History of America" ply their trade in Ivy League humanities departments, a good number do not. This arguably more democratic purview puts into practice the criteria used in selecting just which works or cultural phenomena made the table of contents. With novelists, artists, publishers, directors, editors, playwrights and cultural commentators all enlisted to add their voices, the collection finds an enviable balance between the celebratory and the cerebral, which gives the volume an entertainment value typically not found in works of its kind.

Of course, some essays strike this balance better than others.

Marcus and Sollors encouraged contributors to approach their selected subjects as if they had the first say, as if they were the first to write about a given work or cultural moment.

Breaking the habits of increasing academic professionalization, the essays collected here encourage readers to recapture that sense of enthusiastic response often deadened by having to enter an argument or stake a particular claim.

Writing about the composition and reception of Grant Wood's "American Gothic," Sarah Vowell tells the reader to "trust the painting, not the painter," a dictum she and the majority of the contributors follow brilliantly. The resulting picture of American literary history put forth in this montage of a volume mirrors the wild divergences and unlikely alliances that characterize America itself. All in all, a commendable achievement.