The Unfixed Figure of Youth as the Expression of Uneven Development

In the twilight of the American Literary Renaissance, an era later labeled America's Coming of Age (1915) by Van Wyck Brooks, Nathanial Hawthorne's The Dolliver Romance (c. 1868) ironically intimated that youth “is the proper, permanent, and genuine condition of man” (21), a phrase Herman Melville also quoted in his unpublished novella Billy Budd, Sailor (1891). It was an ironic refrain of Nature (1836), in which Ralph Waldo Emerson had peered into New England's woods and envisioned in these “plantations of God” a region of “perpetual youth,” where “the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me,” offering “something more dear and connate than in streets or villages” of preindustrial society (10). Those social spaces that form the substance of nations—streets, villages—were to be rethought in the pursuit of an imagined place untainted by the condition of industrialism and political fragmentation. The Young American in Literature was to steer the nation's future toward that chimeric region of youthful innocence (Emerson 211), a place where self-reliance could be facilitated, a philosophical concept that echoed the German concept of Bildung, denoting youth's development into the civic ideal through education and culture (Jeffers 4). The Civil War arrested that development. Instead of uniting into a nation delimited by a centralized culture of nationalism, a collectionof loosely interconnected localities, states, and regions were cast adrift in the disorienting transnational flows of industrial capitalist modernity. Without a national culture to anchor the nation's rapid development from the 1880s, that symbolic figure of youth, unable to return to that region of stability, had prematurely arrived upon the precipice of adulthood: an unknown future of national destiny and capitalist modernity.

These anecdotes form a prelude to the history this book will rehearse, which is the story of uneven development in the United States, as it related to the literary genre that narrates the end of the season of youth: the Bildungsroman, often interpreted of late as the novel of development.