'Across the Gulf': Working in the 'Post-Recovery' Era

Summary

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Yes, I am taking a "historical" approach; no theorizing of a field has "legs," as it were, unless it is rooted in a deep knowledge of the culture it seeks to elucidate. [...] I want to use this essay precisely as a series of questions.

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'Across the Gulf': Working in the 'Post-Recovery' Era

What do critics mean when they use the phrase post-recovery? It is a paradoxical term in many ways - valid, because we have moved so far beyond the simple recovery of forgotten or understudied women writers to asking far more critically challenging and culturally significant questions about these writers and their texts; but the term is also invalid because it suggests an end to the necessity of recovery. Rather than post-recovery, I prefer to view recovery as a multi-phased process in which the next phase of our work will be that of regeneration. We have accomplished so much since I was a graduate student in the mid-1980s when we read Anne Bradstreet and Phillis Wheatley and then skipped to Margaret Fuller, followed by an even greater leap forward to Edith Wharton. I have always thought that my attraction to Rebecca Harding Davis was in part due to her repeated use of the term "across the gulf" as a recognition of how many cultural grand canyons had not yet been bridged. What we need to do, of course, is to continue our recovery work while at the same time pushing ourselves to pose more challenging questions about individual texts or sets of texts and the ways they disrupt what we think we know about our particular periods of specialization. That is, reaching across the gulf is not simply building bridges to an understanding of the past; it is equally generating new and different ways of theorizing what we discover in the process.

To envision ourselves as having already recovered the "significant" pretwentieth...

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