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Networked Literary History and the Bohemians of Antebellum New York

The bohemians of antebellum New York are a problem for US literary history. Apart from their association with Walt Whitman (who found friends, supporters, and lovers among them), the writers and artists who gathered at Charles Pfaff’s beer cellar have rarely found purchase in anthologies, syllabi, scholarly works, or any of the other markers of having achieved a reliable presence in literary history. Rather than spend the following pages making a case for why they should be included in histories of US literature, I turn to how Whitman and the bohemians productively reframe one of our most resilient models for literary history: namely, the impulse to structure authors, texts, and aesthetic practices into stories of progressive change over time. As opposed to narratives of literary history that move in what Jordan Alexander Stein calls the “regular and uninterrupted sequence” of one genre-defining (or genre-breaking) innovation after another (859), the bonds that the bohemians forged in the beer halls and boardinghouses of midcentury Manhattan offer a networked approach to literary history. Networks invite attention to the limbs and offshoots that might otherwise be pruned from literary histories concerned with smooth and continuous progress over time, particularly when progress is defined by the appearance of a singularly unique voice (such as Whitman’s) or a transformative work of literature (such as Leaves of Grass [1855–92]) that begets a line of descendants through to the present. Networks provide a mechanism for keeping track of lateral movements in history,