“If you’re really serious about this kind of project and its accessibility and popularizing both the ideas and the content,” she says, “a more natural form nowadays would probably be online publication,” she says.

SKIPPING AHEAD

In this technologically-driven era, Internet users instinctively turn to the web—whether it is Wikipedia, or even simply Google—for the answers to any fact-based question. And Wikipedia, with its straightforward language and related links, is nothing if not accessible. Fundamentally, “Literary History” attempts to recreate the accessibility of this online reference source, even while it seeks to redefine what an encyclopedic work means to readers.

And yet to eschew the simplicity of Wikipedia is also to risk losing a reader in the midst of haphazard associations and esoteric mentions of related events and figures. “Literary History” has admirable intentions; it has striven to narrate a portion of America’s literary history by concentrating on the rigorous analysis of facts, while still keeping readers engaged.

According to Kaufman, however, a reference book written largely by individuals established in the academy has an inherent flaw, regardless of that work’s accessibility. “To a certain extent it kind of demonstrates the academic mindset, in that the only other people who have read the book contributed to it,” Kaufman says. “This happens all the time in academia. It’s just that they chose a different kind of academic, so some of the contributors are out as public intellectuals and public figures.”

For Wisse, as well, the work is a valuable resource, and one which will provide a basis of lively discussion over the content and criticism presented in the anthology. However, she admits, “I don’t often approach these things with high hopes.” Referring again to the tendency authors, including herself, have to fixedly retain their certain style of prose, she says, “I think that one can compare the essays that people wrote with their general writing and see a correlation…If they published in academic publications in a certain style, they probably carried that over.”

“When a general reader like yourself can’t understand something the fault is generally not in you but in the poor thinking [of the author],” she explains.

But for the founder of this project at least, “Literary History” is the original, thought-provoking, and explicable reference work he had hoped to create so many years ago at the project’s conception.

“We are trying to raise the level of discourse, not in an academic way but in a democratic way,” Waters says. “I hope [the book] doesn’t seem exclusive or elitist because I don’t think it is. But the fact that people can write—if that’s the sin, we’re willing to be condemned.”

—Staff writer Denise J. Xu can be reached at dxu@fas.harvard.edu.