“Vital the Pending Questions”

Abstract

Abstract For literary historians, the 1850s have characteristically been seen as the climax, as well as the “twilight,” of American Romanticism. The later fictional works of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, in particular, are said to mark the moment when the protagonists of American literature begin to find themselves “looking for the world of the romance and finding that of the novel,” with its emphasis on literary realism and the faithful depiction of social circumstances. And, of course, the literary historical shift from Romanticism to realism has long been linked to the Civil War, with Romanticism relegated to precincts of antebellum U.S. literature and literary realism emerging as the dominant postbellum and late-nineteenth-century aesthetic. More recently, however, literary scholars have been productively challenging the typical bifurcation of nineteenth-century literature into pre- and post-1865 eras. The Coda gestures briefly to the literary and philosophical continuities that extend beyond the temporal boundary—1865—that has traditionally divided literary historical periods within the discipline and how a “turn to liberalism” can revivify the place of literary studies in the broader civic life of U.S. democracy.