Antho-logic : the anthology and 20th century U.S. literature
Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.

This study argues that the contemporary literary anthology functioned as a characteristic and consequential vehicle for the reproduction of U.S.-American literature throughout the twentieth century, and that therefore, despite being generally unrecognized as such, the 20th century contemporary U.S. literary anthology constitutes a historically significant genus of literary text, one crucial to understanding the history of twentieth century U.S. literature. Accordingly, Part I defines this 20th century contemporary U.S. literary anthology, for the purposes of our inquiry, by accounting for the terms in which we conceive of it. While we will occasionally refer to this object in abbreviated forms—as for example simply the anthology—the bulky formulation of 20th century contemporary U.S. literary anthology will remain its technical nomenclature. This label's terms establish our object's defining features: its historical period as that of the 20th century; its temporality as contemporary (a temporality which in the case of the anthology also implies a certain mode of historicity, as we will discuss); its national designation as U.S.-American; and its aesthetic self-identification as literary. Over the course of this chapter we will critically excavate and explicate each of these terms as they bear on our object of study. However, by way of practical introduction, we can briefly define this object as follows: The 20th century contemporary U.S. literary anthology refers to a book produced and published in the United States between approximately 1912 and 2017, which contains multiple distinct aesthetic writings (e.g. poetry, fiction, drama, or essays) by multiple distinct authors, and which characteristically presents these contents as "new, " "recent, " "emergent, " or otherwise contemporary relative to the book's date of publication. This definition should settle some questions that commonly crop up when first discussing the anthology. For example, though in popular usage the word "anthology" sometimes refers to collections of multiple works by a single author, our study will exclusively use it in reference to collections of different works by multiple different authors, usually authoring their contributions individually. The definition given above also indicates that, unless noted otherwise, when we refer to the 20th century contemporary U.S. literary anthology we will typically mean a U.S. literary anthology produced at some moment throughout the 20th century, containing works that were in some sense contemporary relative to its historical moment of publication. Therefore, we will not focus on on retrospective canon-surveys such as the touchstone Norton textbooks, but rather on a series of more-or-less presentist texts appearing at distinct successive historical moments ranging between 1912 and 2017. As we will demonstrate, the contemporary U.S. literary anthology becomes the 20th century contemporary U.S. literary anthology by virtue of its emergence as a functional, characteristic, and influential vehicle for the production and reproduction of U.S. literature throughout the century in question, a century materially characterized by the U.S.A.'s ascendancy as the world's dominant monopoly-capitalist empire