How do you capture the culture of a nation? And anyway, what is culture? What is a nation, for that matter? David Cameron, Old Etonian and would-be man of the people, says that he's looking forward to a “really trashy novel” at the start of his holiday; this will empty his mind completely, he says. Good-oh, Dave, whatever floats your boat.

But distinctions between trash or not-trash are pretty hard to make. A lot of people thought that Stephen King was trash, once upon a time; but then there he was appearing in The Paris Review and surely that meant that he crossed the trash-barrier? Do big sales mean trash? What about Dickens, then? King and Dickens, each in their way, would serve as nice markers for their national cultures, too - single markers among the many, many that would have to be on offer.

It's no easier to define American culture than it is any other culture, except in one way: America is as much an idea as it is a place. Or, as the cultural critic Greil Marcus puts it: “From the start, people have been trying to figure out what America is. The country itself - even before it was a nation - has always been the country's great subject: in every kind of writing, in public address, in music, on the stage, on the screen. Thus the country has produced a deep and kaleidoscopic literary reflection of itself - but more than that, the literary attempt to say what the country is, taken in the broadest sense, has become an ongoing national argument about what the country can and should be. And that argument is as alive in a film by Preston Sturges as in Jefferson's First Inaugural Address.”

Marcus is the influential author of, among other works, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century and Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession. Now, in conjunction with Harvard University Press, he and Werner Sollors, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English and Afro-American Studies at Harvard University, are taking on the literary history of the United States. A New Literary History of America, to be published in the autumn, aims to be “a massive, chronological register of the speeches, letters, poetry, plays and novels that America has used to figure itself out along the way”. Its taster website has just gone live, and offers an intriguing glimpse of the delights within.

Even David Cameron may find himself intrigued. For while, yes, you'll find the kinds of things you might expect in such a tome (and tome is the right word: it's going to be huge) such as an essay about W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington, or Camille Paglia on Tennessee Williams, you'll also find a piece about Linda Lovelace's 1980 book Ordeal - written about the filming of the 1972 film Deep Throat.

There is David Thomson on Charlie Chaplin, and Jonathan Letham on Thomas Alva Edison. The last is a fascinating piece about the year Edison met Eadweard Muybridge, whose slideshow lecture, The Attitudes of Animals in Motion, foreshadowed the birth of the motion picture: in 1888, it seems, cinema was sparked into life.

Chaplin? Lovelace? Edison? So I ask again: what is literature, anyway? The blessing is that there has never been an answer to this question - Harvard's NLHA looks set to keep us guessing.

www.newliteraryhistory.com

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