Secret Histories: Reading Twentieth-Century American Literature

by David Wyatt

Secret Histories claims that the history of the nation is hidden―in plain sight―within the pages of twentieth-century American literature. David Wyatt argues that the nation's fiction and nonfiction expose a "secret history" that cuts beneath the "straight histories" of our official accounts. And it does so by revealing personal stories of love, work, family, war, and interracial romance as they were lived out across the decades of the twentieth century. Wyatt reads authors both familiar and neglected, examining "double consciousness" in the post–Civil War era through works by Charles W. Chesnutt, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington. He reveals aspects of the Depression in the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Anzia Yezierska, and John Steinbeck. Period by period, Wyatt's nuanced readings recover the felt sense of life as it was lived, opening surprising dimensions of the critical issues of a given time. The rise of the women's movement, for example, is revivified in new appraisals of works by Eudora Welty, Ann Petry, and Mary McCarthy. Running through the examination of individual works and times is Wyatt's argument about reading itself. Reading is not a passive activity but an empathetic act of cocreation, what Faulkner calls "overpassing to love." Empathetic reading recognizes and relives the emotional, cultural, and political dimensions of an individual and collective past. And discovering a usable American past, as Wyatt shows, enables us to confront the urgencies of our present moment.

424 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2010

About the author

Former professor of English at the University of Maryland.

David^^Wyatt

Reviews

[Christopher Sutch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wyatt's training as a formalist critic is readily apparent in this critical overview of the last century's literary highlights. This is not to say that he is totally unversed in various kinds of theoretical outlook, only that his readings tend to focus, literally, on formal features of the text as a basis for his readings. This works wonderfully sometimes, as in his terrific readings of Hemingway, Toomer, and Faulkner, but it doesn't work so well when covering works with which Wyatt is obviously less familiar (the best example is Pynchon's _Gravity's Rainbow_, which Wyatt manages to integrate into his argument and "explain" in a handful of pages, necessarily reducing the vast richness of Pynchon's narrative to enable it to fit into a sort of formalist box of predetermined meaning). It's also distressing to see how far his white- and male-centered context continues, even after he has obviously worked so hard to read outside and beyond it. He gives very good readings of Morrison's _Beloved_ (especially its conversation with Faulknew's _Absalom, Absalom_), Richard Rodriguez and others. However, his acknowledgements and thanks are addressed exclusively to male colleagues (literally NO women appear in the list, even though he acknowledges that his "friend" Angela Davis first called his attention to the fact that his syllabi included no African-American authors). So the good readings Wyatt supplies in this volume are far outweighed by various problems many sorts of readers may have them.

One final note: Wyatt has a real difficulty in clearly summarizing plots or in making his many digressive references to other texts comprehensible. I'm acquainted with much of the literature he reads and references, but even I was confused by these features of Wyatt's writing.