Rising Stars and Raging Diseases: The Rhetoric and Reality of Antebellum Canonization

Abstract

In an 1849 sketch, bookseller William R. Davis described the contents of a whimsical “curiosity shop,” stocked solely with clichés. Merchandise included “The finger that's in every body's pie,” “Some of the spice of Life,” “A rusty link from the bond of friendship,” “The bridle used in curbing the passions,” and “One of the bowels of the earth.” The humor of Davis's sketch rested on its ability to defamiliarize everyday tropes to the point where vehicle overwhelmed tenor, literalizing the figurative and making the reader aware of the submerged discourses upon which such figures relied. Davis's humorous exploration of conventional rhetoric resonates strongly today, for cultural historians have taken a comparable linguistic turn, exposing and exploring the figurative dimensions of ostensibly literal discourses. Recent studies in composition pedagogy, popular culture, theology, natural history, genre analysis, and historiography have all emphasized the extent to which figurative discourse structures and defines the very fields it purports to explain. As Hayden White argues, “All systems of knowledge begin … in a metaphorical characterization of something presumed to be unknown in terms of something presumed to be known, or at least familiar.” Yet while this linguistic self-consciousness has greatly inspired the study of, among other areas, traditional historiography, it has scarcely had an impact on our understanding of literary historiography. Few have studied antebellum figures of speech as closely as Davis, nor have they tested antebellum literary historical and critical theories by the standards or techniques of figurative analysis. Such an exercise, I contend, would reveal much about both the theory and practice of literary canonization in 19th-century America.