You recently wrote the introduction to the latest edition of Sylvester Judd’s “Margaret.” What drew you to this project?

“Latest edition” implies there’s been some amount of attention to this American novel, when the really hasn’t been.  It’s a book that’s fallen over the cliff of literary history.  The novel is by a neglected New England writer called Sylvester Judd (1813—53).  Set in the turbulent years following the American revolution, it’s the story of a young woman’s attempt to overcome the poverty and vice of her surroundings to establish the utopian ideals of the nation in her New England village.  I became aware of the book when I was researching American literature as a post-doc at Harvard.  I became interested in the question of why there was such a frenzy of utopian activity in the United States in the 1840s.  A bunch of utopian communes sprang up all over the country.  Reading into the history of the period, I became aware of this novel called Margaret–a novel all about the establishment of a utopian community, but also much more than that.  It’s the closest thing we have to a “Transcendental novel,” and it’s a breathtaking, encyclopedic introduction to the culture of the mid-nineteenth century.  It’s all in there!

In your introduction, you remark that the novel is revolutionary in depicting a heroine who grows “in social rather than domestic power.” Would you consider this a feminist text?

I’d say it’s somewhere between a feminist and a religious text.  It’s important to realize the restricted space of female protagonists in the literature of this period.  The only power available to women characters was in a domestic space.  The ideal for women, according to the ideology of the time, was to be the Angel in the Home.  Margaret takes her feminine and spiritual power out into the world, designing a society based on her transcendent selfhood.  Scholars tend to read the Bildungsroman (the “coming-of-age” novel) as a kind of fiction in which the protagonist comes to accept the conventions of society.  But in Margaret it’s the reverse: society changes to reflect the demands of self.  It’s an interesting twist.

How do you think the creation of a female protagonist such as this one is complicated by the fact that the novelist was male?

Perhaps the radical quality of the work emerges because the novelist was male. He was able to see beyond many of the ideologies of his culture.  Hence he was able to take a story involving a female character and interweave it with themes far beyond the scope of gender–themes of ecology, social justice, and political history, to mention just a few.

Why have you chosen to concentrate much of your scholarship on American literature–what fascinates you about it?

This is a question I’ve just been addressing in an undergraduate seminar on Antebellum American literature and culture.  The students seemed much more familiar with the British literary tradition, and I think they were surprised by the style and structure of many of the American texts we read–works such as Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.  I became interested in American literature when a graduate student at Princeton.  I’d just finished a degree in English literature, so when I started reading these nineteenth-century American texts I found them…well…weird.  Weird and wonderful and eccentric and difficult.  American literature does not quite come out of the same tradition as British literature.  It emerges from the sermon and from the political pamphlet, and hence tends to be at once quite political and euphoric.  Think of Leaves of Grass.  American writers, to me, all seemed to be so very unsure of themselves and what they were doing.  Hence these works, in the nineteenth century at least, can seem a bit all-over-the-place.  Think of Moby-Dick.  What is it, an adventure story  or a philosophical tract, or an encyclopedia of whaling?  It’s all of those things.  A former colleague once said to me: “You can find everything Dickens could do in the works of Melville, but the same is not true in reverse.”  This isn’t quite true.  Melville was never capable of the kind of multi-plotted novels like Dickens’s Bleak House.  But it’s mostly true, I think.  Melville’s work is so various, and so weird, and so formally eccentric at every point.  I value these qualities.

You’ve explored issues of race and class in much of your previous work–what do you think is unique in the American treatment of these topics?

You could argue that “race” is the great American subject.  So many writers have been concerned with racial difference and interaction, and this continues to be the case.  So I think that in American literature you get an amazing variety of literary approaches to this question.  Class is interesting because, at one level, it seems not to be an American subject at all.  The nation was meant to be an antidote to all that rigid class structure associated with Europe.  Of course it wasn’t, but ideas of class do get deflected in interesting ways, often merging with questions of race and ethnic difference.  It’s always problematic to argue for uniqueness, though I do think that the merging of class-based and racial themes in American literature is quite peculiar.  Think again of Moby-Dick.  It’s as much about the “horizontal” difference between cultures as it is about the “vertical” hierarchies of social power.

What is your favorite novel and why?

My favorite novel is Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo-Jumbo (1972).  It’s a bizarre, postmodernist novel, set in the 1920s, that attempts to offer a whole, revised history of western civilization!  I can’t think of another book that’s so short but attempts to contain so much, though Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 also comes to mind.

Which contemporary writer do you think has written a classic?

That’s a difficult question because there are so many amazing writers out there today: Toni Morrison, Richard Powers, Thomas Pynchon… I’ve just been teaching Morrison’s Beloved–that’s certainly a classic in the way that it weaves together major tropes of the American literary tradition with a distinct African-American vernacular tradition.  It’s also a difficult book, both in its themes and its technique.  Difficulty often helps to make a classic!