THE ANATOMY OF AN EARLY ENGLISHDEPARTMENT RESEARCH METHOD: SOURCES AND PARALLELS IN THEORY AND PRACTICE

After the Civil War, American educational reformers set about transforming the nation’s higher educational institutions: to do so, they borrowed extensively from the contemporary German university model, but also introduced several important innovations, including the division of teaching and research into discrete academic departments. English departments, along with many others, were first established in American universities in the 1870s and 1880s. To organize these departments, the new breed of university presidents turned to the young Americans who had traveled to Germany in order to pursue advanced studies in language and literature. Trained in German philological theory and method, these scholars quickly organized departmental teaching and research along philological lines. Around the turn of the century, English-departments shifted from their initial focus on German linguistic philology to a focus on the broader vistas of German cultural philology. This article will briefly examine the theories and methods of cultural philology and will then discuss the ways in which one of its central hermeneutic methods, the investigation of sources and parallels, was used in actual research. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, this hermeneutic served to motivate and justify diverse kinds of investigation and was perhaps the dominant form of English-department research as is evidenced by its prominence both in journal articles and scholarly monographs and in scholarly editions intended for undergraduates and the general public.