New Work Puts Literature in a Historical Context
Students of nineteenth-century American literature have a fresh resource to draw on, a brand-new encyclopedia edited by two Georgia State professors. Janet Gabler-Hover and Robert Sattelmeyer, both professors of English, spent three years working on American History in Literature, 1820-1870, which is one volume in a three-volume set. They decided what entries they wanted, found experts to write them, and edited the results into a single volume.
The entries provide a historical context for the literature of the period. Literature is always a response to the time in which it was written, Gabler-Hover explains.
"Students can have a hard time thinking of history as real," she said. "We're trying to help them engage with the realities of past times." In order to do that, the book covers topics from abolitionism, to transcendentalism, to the development of the dime store novel. The volume does have entries on particular literary works, but not on individual authors, which is unusual.
"We're not saying the author is dead," Sattelmeyer says. "But we're focusing on literary works as they are socially and culturally conditioned."
It’s uncommon for such a massive project to have co-authors who work in the same department, Gabler-Hover says. The collaboration worked well because both are strong scholars, and because they have different areas of expertise.
"I learned so much from doing this," Sattelmeyer says. "It was really kind of astonishing." Among other things, he says, he now has a lifetime's worth of research ideas to pass along to his students.