Creating the Cold War canon: A history of the Center for Editions of American Authors

The Center for Editions of American Authors was a government-funded Cold War-era organization tasked with producing definitive editions of canonized nineteenth-century writers. Just when literary theorists like Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault were declaring the death of the author at the end of the 1960s, the CEAA gained its funding and authority through claims that its techno-scientific methodology could restore authorial intention to American works by “purging” them of the “corruptions” introduced by editors, compositors, and other actors in the original publishing process. This method was attractive to a U.S. government invested in the ideology of freedom of expression. Though the extent to which this process altered its texts made it a controversial choice, the editions that the CEAA produced became the standard texts for the study of many American authors. “Creating the Cold War Canon” is the first extended study of the CEAA and its effects on the scholarship of American literary history.

This dissertation narrates the rise of American scholarly editing and its institutionalization via the CEAA and supporting organizations like the MLA and the NEH, and then considers how the CEAA’s intentionalist methodology has determined the approach of more recent editions. Throughout, I analyze key editions including the Centenary Edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Frederick Douglass Papers Edition, the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition, and Walden: A Fluid Text Edition. Ultimately, I show that the CEAA’s insistence on restoring authorial intention to the works under consideration deform their texts by eliding the crucial participation of nonauthorial actors. The result is that a Romantic, individualistic conception of authorship is reified in the American canon through this Cold War-era project’s focus on the freedom of expression of the “inspired” author.