Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture Volume 8, Number 2 doi 10.1215/15314200-2007-039 © 2008 by Duke University Press 227 National Narratives and the Politics of Inclusion: Historicizing American Literature Anthologies Joe Lockard and Jillian Sandell Theorizing the Anthology The anthology qua genus has remained relatively untheorized, a remarkable fact given the genre’s popularity and centrality in teaching U.S. literature. The discrepancy between the popularity of the form and the critical attention it receives suggests that anthologies are taken for granted as an unremarkable feature of the publishing world. Yet this “taken for grantedness” also masks their political and literary efects. Even though the key contributor to any anthology is the editor, for example, the role of anthology editors in general is hard to understand within traditional literary criticism since, as Leah Price (2000: 2) notes, an editor “cuts across the divisions of labor” that typically distinguish writer from reader, critic, and censor. The multiplicity of authors collected in an anthology competes with the editorial voice, and this tension often makes a collection hard to evaluate, especially since anthologies are typically received as simply collections of materials and earn less academic prestige than do individually authored books. That the normative “American” literary voice in teaching anthologies might be gendered male and racialized white is by now a truism. The role of U.S. literature anthologies in maintaining this voice, however, is perhaps less obvious. Although national literature is now often mainstream literature, PED82_03-Lockard.indd 227 1/8/08 12:43:46 PM