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The six essays in Purloined Letters represent thirty years of careful meditation on the theory of a national literaturespecifically, "American" literature - and constitute the culminating work of the late Joseph N. Riddel's career. It was in The Inverted Bell, his groundbreaking study of William Carlos Williams and American modernism, that Riddel began to work at composing a history of American poetics in terms of "beginnings." The essays collected here (three of them never before published) carry the question of modernism back into classic nineteenth-century American literature - the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, William James, and others - exploring Riddel's cardinal "American" oppositions: creation versus representation, poetry versus criticism, geography versus "ego-graphy." In Riddel's view, "American" literature belongs to a conceptual order, not to a historical period or geographical locale. "American literature," he believes, is a product of standard canonization procedures, even though, ironically, American writing questions the very process of canonization - the assumptions about origin, influence, and destiny that inform any canon. Riddel's interpretations of Emerson, Poe, and the others render those assumptions problematic and offer us an understanding of our literature and history that differs from the various suggestions of F. O. Matthiessen, Richard Chase, and other prominent American scholars Riddel begins by recognizing the American writer's double bind: Such a writer must first invent that which can then be represented. He must invent and not discover, perform and not imitate. He must deal with the question of "translation" - the need for a New World language that escapes Old World history. Hence, "America" as projected in American literature is not so much a history of what occurred as a dream to be arrived at. How Emerson, Poe, Hawthorne, Henry Adams, and other nineteenth-century American writers explore their dilemma is the subject of these trenchant essays. Purloined Letters offers an alternative interpretation of the canon, a curious but highly significant philosophical twist upon such standard notions as the "American Adam," the "American Renaissance," and "Virgin Land.
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