The poetics of national and racial identity in nineteenth-century American literature

At last, a scholar has broken from the F.O. Matthiessen box and treated African-American and Southern writers with sensitivty. Matthiessen's AMERICAN RENAISSANCE has been the major exclusionist, elitist work now for over half a century, and Kerkering may at last get the dialogue started. I particularly like his comparison of William G. Simms to Hawthorne. I'm not persuaded by all he says of the former, but I'm glad to see that Kerkering takes Simms seriously and finds his writing of value. A long time coming! See also Kerkering's recent essay on Simms and Whitman in VICTORIAN POETRY, in which he shows Simms to be more current in many ways than Whitman.