Xref: murdoch uva.engl.amstdsma:102 Newsgroups: uva.engl.amstdsma Path: murdoch!darwin.clas.Virginia.EDU!abh9h From: abh9h@darwin.clas.Virginia.EDU (Alan B. Howard) Subject: C.Strout Message-ID: Sender: usenet@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU Organization: uva Date: Mon, 19 Sep 1994 22:01:42 GMT Tocqueville and the Idea of an American Literature (1941- 1971) Cushing Strout IT MIGHT SEEM perverse to focus on the idea of an American literature by paying much attention to the opinions of a youthful French liberal aristocrat who had no opportunity of reading any of it. All he had to say about it after his visit in 1831 can be found in a few pages of Democracy in America, where he prophesies about the shape of modern democratic literature. Moreover, democracy for him is an ideal type or model of an egalitarian system, one mainly pertinent to a possible French future and only partially illustrated in American actuality, which in his view had some powerful antibodies against the bleak diseases of modernism that might isolate citizens under the soft despotism of a paternalistic administration.l For Tocqueville the sources of poetry in a democratic world centered around the nature of man himself, because the social space between the individual and the state would be empty of the aristocratic forms of life that had previously filled it. Reflecting on the examples of Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and Byron, he prophesied in the 1840 volume of his book that modern democratic writers would, by focusing on "passions and ideas" in "the hidden depths of man's spiritual nature," illuminate by exaggeration, as he put it, "certain dark corners of the human heart."2 Tocqueville's prophecy fell on deaf ears until 1941, but from then on, for the next two decades especially, an influential group of American literary critics praised his prescience about what they took to be the persistent American aspect of` our classic nineteenth-century literature from Poe to James. Tocqueville often seemed pertinent because the critics were looking f`or ways to recognize a difference between American and English literature. In 1937 an introduction to a study of twentieth-century American literature described the modern writer as a cosmopolitan who "sees no distinction between American civilization and European civilization."3 But it was this difference itself that fascinated critics in the following two decades. Summing up a conference of distinguished intellectuals on "The National Style," the historian Elting E. Morison confessed that it was "a little depressing that twenty-five learned Americans could find so little more to say about ourselves in 1957 than a single visiting Frenchman had said in 1835."4 Tocqueville's hour had come because the hour of American power and of mass culture had also come. It is not surprising, given Tocqueville's image of a privatized modern age, that Northerners rather than Southerners would seize upon his literary prophecy. It would be professors in New England and New York universities who would make the most of Tocqueville precisely becausE they responded so sympathetically to the abstrac and metaphysical characteristics they saw in a canon of American classics from which Southern writers were notably absent. It was not only because they had not yet quite developed that quarrel with themselves from which poetry is made, but also because Tocqueville envisioned a poetic subject disengaged from society, and so his prophecy could not include the plantation novel, whether written by the Southerner William Gilmore Simms or the Northerner Harriet Beecher Stowe. Tocqueville's reference to an exaggerated illumination of the heart's dark corners was congenial to the theorizing about the "romance" by his American contemporaries, whose "prevailing tendency was to see It as an escape or a flight from the actual, going above or beyond or inside--and this is the qualifying point--human experience."5 As a compensation for lacking "social characteristics and historical connotations," this idea of the "romance" as "escape from the world and society" was rediscovered, in effect, by twentieth-century critics. F. O. Matthiessen's The American Renaissance applied Tocqueville's prophecy to Emerson and Whitman insofar as they had followed Tocqueville's idea that the chief subject of democratic poetry would be "Man himself, not tied to time or place, but face to face with nature and with God."6 At the same time W. H. Auden, a recent emigr to America, defined classic American literature from Poe to James as "a literature of lonely people," symbolically exploring "a timeless and unlocated (because internal) psychomachia." Later, Auden would observe that if Tocqueville had truly characterized modern poetry, America had never known any other kind.7 In the following decade Lionel Trilling reinforced the asocial implications in Tocqueville's and Auden's denial of time and place. He thought Tocqueville saw. "the greatness of isolation," in our major writers, and Trilling even found in them "a disenchantment or disgust with the very idea of society,"8 something first fully seen by D. H. Lawrence in his Studies in Classic American Literature. Trilling influentially proposed a sharp contrast between the abstract, "deso- cialized" American romance and the concrete, socially dense English novel of manners. Other critics, such as Marius Bewley, R. W. B. Lewis, Charles Feidelson, Harry Levin, and especially Richard Chase, extended Trilling's idea so that metaphysical symbolism and mythicized characters became the hallmarks of` American nationality in literature. How do we account for this emergence of a paradigm about our literature over a hundred years after its formulation? The development is intelligible only in the light of` the previous treatment of our literature, the intellectual prestige of symbolism, the political role of America in the war and postwar years, and the reception of American literature in Europe. The striking thing about literary opinion in America before the 1940s was the long period of apology and condescension for American literature as a poor country cousin of its English ancestor. V. L. Parrington and Van Wyck Brooks finally escaped this colonial complex, but both of these critics were Jeffersonian in temper, lacking sympathy for writers who were either pessimistic or skeptical about democracy, human nature, and progress. Yet these traits marked the most powerful modernist poets and novelists, who were also alien to the vulgar Marxists of the 1930s, who confused their cult of the literature of a proletarian class with the propaganda of a party. Moreover, symbolism and myth were in the intellectual air as ways of coming to terms with the nonrational in human experience and also with the typical gestures of modernism in the arts with its taste for a certain abstractness. Even in folk culture the modern critic found a non-naturalistic tradition including "the abstraction of a Jonathan Edwards sermon, a Navajo blanket, a John Henry feat, and a Vermont hooked rug," and it was Marin rather than Norman Rockwell who was painting in it.9 Leslie Fiedler did not need to adopt his enfant terrible role to announce in 1958 that "the last thirty years have been a time of triumph for American literature. Throughout the world, our classic books have come to seem more and more not merely excellent or interesting but central to the development of contemporary literature everywhere--a challenge to other long accepted traditions and an example to the writer in a mass culture." Fiedler also saw that Melville is "our age's darling, and this has meant not only a revision of the earlier estimates of him and his work, but a redefinition of the writers around him ... indeed of our literature as a whole." The advantage of symbolism as a way of talking about American writers was to provide a "long overdue counterbalance to the never-satisfactory view of our literary history as a slow struggle upward from darkness toward realism."10 Instead of apologizing f`or our classic writers f`or their lack of English robustness, as earlier critics had done, the new critics could find in the idea of the romance a genre term to account for the qualities in American writing that distinguished it from English social realism. In this way the romance made something positive out of the lack of social density in the American novel in terms of English social class. Near the end of` the twenties Edmund Wilson had called for a criticism that would recognize how Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe "anticipated, in the middle of the last century, the temperament of our own day and invented methods for rendering it."11 In 1953 Charles Fei- delson answered the call in his Symbolism in American Literature. It substituted for Matthiessen's theme of our classic writers' "devotion to the possibilities of democracy" an aesthetic focus on "their devotion to the possibilities of symbolism." He was entirely candid about his modern interest in seeing our classic writers "as a proving ground for the issues to which the method of modern literature is an answer."12 In a symposium on myth in 1958 Claude Lvi-Strauss suggested that since the pattern of myth points both to past time and to all time what has replaced its function in modern societies is political ideology.l3 The point can be reversed, for myth tended to replace politics for lntellectuals who identified with the theme of Daniel Bell's The End of Ideology. It summed up a decade of political disenchantment with Marxist ideology by concluding that ideas were no longer "social levers" because the passing of chiliastic socialism had left a prosaic world in which to invest issues with "moral color and high emotional charge is to invite conflicts which can only damage a society."l4 This repudiation of intellectual and moral passion in politics inevitably made the political world much less interesting than the literary world of symbols and myths. R. W. B. Lewis's The American Adam, published at the same time as the symposium on myth, invoked Tocqueville's prophecy to identify a recurring American story of an Adamic person, "at home only in the presence of nature and God," being "thrust by circumstances into an actual world and an actual age.''l5 Lewis's reference to an actual world and an actual time was a valuable modification of Tocqueville's idea and of the self-referential modernism celebrated in Feidelson's insistence that symbolism's "characteristic subject is its own equivocal method" (73). Other devotees of` the Tocqueville theme, however, were more inclined, as in Daniel Hoffman's Form and Fable in American Fiction, to see the romance form as "an ahistorical depiction of the individual's discovery of his own identity in a world where his essential self is inviolate and independent of such involvements in history." But Hoffman too admitted at the back door the involvements in history that he had driven out the front by noting how in American folklore and fiction the American hero "must define himself in conflict with a more stable ritual-figure or society reflecting the American inheritance of European culture and its burdens of historical responsibility." Yet the Tocqueville theme inclined him to confuse literature with history by assuming that "the American had neither a class nor a history to fix his place in society, neither priest nor church to ameliorate his relation to the immensities.''l6 These Americans without class or church to define them, however, are rather like mythical reflections of our national folklore with its hyperbole about the superiority of the New World to the Old. In this sense, as Hoffman himself recognized, our folklore and fiction reflect "the continuity of culture and the struggles of history" in the recurrence of New World opposition to the Old. Our writers have treated the latter critically whenever they have dealt with what Henry James called "the international theme," which entered as well into the work of Irving, Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, and Howells.l7 One of Trilling's most prominent students, Norman Podhoretz, saw that his teacher was influential because he was so much "in tune with the temper of a period which found Tocqueville a more reliable guide than Marx to the American reality.''l8 For Trilling the intellectuals' idea of society was largely a construct of "the long war of the French intellectuals with the French bourgeoisie." In the 1950s Trilling spoke for many intellectuals who felt "the virtual uniqueness of American security and well being, and, at the same time, of the danger in which they stand.''l9 Most of them had discovered in the crisis of the Second World War that they had, after all, a stake in American victory. Columbia intellectuals had a close relation to the Partisan Review, and one of its editors in 1952 heralded a "new sense of belonging to their native land" in the attitudes of our intellectuals and artists. A New Yorker writer once joked that Partisan Review typewriters must have had a special key labelled "alienation," but now the editor defined the artist as being suspended "between belonging and alienation."20 Politically, the Partisan Review's courageous anti-Stalinism of the late 1930s had set it on a course opposed to the Popular Front, represented by the League of American Writers. The League tended to link American literary tradition with the left-liberal and fellow-traveling intellectuals, as Van Wyck Brooks did, while the anti-Stalinists saluted instead European writers like Kafka, Silone, Malraux, and Orwell.l By the end of the fifties, however, the new theorists of` American literature had reoriented our classic writers in terms that made them partakers of abstractness, symbolism, and myth--the very qualities the critics admired in European modernists and contemporary writing.21 Van Wyck Brooks's admiration for Henry Wallace whose Progressive Party was manipulated by Communists in 1948 marked his distance from the anti-Stalinist orbit in political terms, but he was separated as well in literary terms every bit as far because for him what Melville saw in Hawthorne as "the power of blackness" could never be "the true voice of America," as it was f`or those who like Harry Levin in his The Power of Blackness, hailed "the symbolic character of our greatest fiction and the dark wisdom of our deeper minds."22 Trilling saw in 1958 that a crucial change had come about through the war in the way we thought of American literature in relation to its English ancestry. The new sense of American destiny came with the decline of English power: "Only then, it seems, could we really begin to think of American literature as being a separate entity, with its own special qualities which existed of and by themselves, with its own history peculiar to itself; with its own kind of development." It seemed to him that now "all the world recognizes a particular quality in our literature which is American or nothing, and perhaps the English recognize it most of all; they see how different this quality is from the quality of their own literature."23 Shortly, the Times Literary Supplement would publish a special number on American writing asserting in Trilling's own terms that for English readers "our own fiction more than we ever realize until we set it against American, is rooted deeply in society; man for the English novelist is social man--and this is so even for Lawrence, who is as much obsessed with class as with sex--man as he exists in the context of a very old, exceedingly complex, hierarchical society; and though the society may be criticized or rebelled against, it remains inescapable."24 There was nothing parochial about this new critical interest in American literature, for it was shared by Europeans. Melville and Hawthorne had new translations in France after 1939, and their work now appeared as legitimate ancestors of the modern American novel, which was enjoying unprecedented and remarkable success in Europe. Henri Peyre observed in 1947 that three out of every four translations from the English language published in France, Italy, Russia, and South America in the last twenty years were from American works. For Europeans threatened by facism, contemporary American books seemed "best attuned to a tragic era of incomprehensible violence and brutal inhumanity of man to man."25 Sartre declared in 1946:"To writers of my generation, the publication of` The 42nd Parallel, Light in August, A Farewell to Arms, effected a revolution similar to the one produced fifteen years earlier in Europe by the Ulysses of Joyce."26 Appropriately, it was in the French Review of` 1950 that a scholar showed how Tocqueville had "put his finger on certain qualities of this literature which only the future would unveil."27 In the sixties the asocial theme of Tocqueville's paradigm about democratic literature persisted, but critics began to take a more critical second look at the orthodoxy that had emerged. When the National Council of English in 1965 published a collection of essays aimed at the teacher of American literature, the editor recommended Chase, Fiedler, Levin, Feidelson, Hoffman, and Lewis, but one essay posted a dissent against Richard Chase's conflation of` the romance form with all the values of modernist criticism.28 Taking a second look at Hawthorne, Lionel Trilling now countered James's complaint about Hawthorne's "thinly composed" world by stressing the positive presence in it of an "iron hardness" for which the world was "ineluctably there in a stubborn way."29 About this time a graduate student of Lewis's, A. N. Kaul, developed the argument that while our classic writers did not write the English social novel, they did, after all, deal with the search for a more satisfying community life, even if they did so on a personal or metaphysical level.30 Richard Poirier in A World Elsewhere continued and modified the desocialized theme that he, like Trilling, found in D. H. Lawrence's essays. Poirier usefully challenged the romance/novel distinction because he saw that "none of the interesting American novelists can be placed on either side of this dichotomy.''3l He expanded on Kaul's idea of "retreat from society into an ideal community" (119) as a recurrent American strain, but his book mainly celebrated the notion of an epic ego in the "hero-poet" who seeks some form of imaginative "relinquishment and possession" (90) and acts in Emersonian-Whitman style as "an imperialist of the inner lives of other people" (94). Poirier did not believe in connecting literary with historical events and proposed instead to see passages in American books as "examples of a modernist impulse" (4) to create through language "an essentially imaginative environment" (5). The American writer was just "the most persistent, the most poignantly heroic example of a recurrent literary compulsion, not at all confined to our literature, to believe in the possibilities of` a new style" (39). Quentin Anderson in The Imperial Self, as his title implies, applied Poirier's idea of the omnivorous hero-poet while exemplifying it by Emerson, Whitman, and James, but his perspective also challenged the tradition which he represented. He charged two generations of critics with having ignored "two tremendous nineteenth century inventions: the concept of society and the concept of history," so that literary works begot other literary works "under the aegis of symbol or myth," rather than "on a scene the historian could conceivably recognize."32 Such a scene, he suggested, would relate character structure and familial relationships to culture, showing how Emerson spoke to a widespread loss of authoritative supporting structures, cracks opening up in "the grain of American communal existence." Tocqueville and Trilling were still benchmarks f`or Anderson, but his relation to both was revisionary. Whatever abstractness Tocqueville observed in the American mind of the 1830s, Anderson knew that the eighteenth-century founding fathers had a socially concrete vocabulary, one that "posited rooted oppositions between warring social interests" (39). While Anderson cited his colleague Trilling on the classic American writer's alleged neglect of the idea of society as the scene of human action, he subverted the traditional notion by treating Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter as being "much more closely akin to the novels of Jane Austen George Eliot, or Trollope than it is to the late James" (77), because the New Englander viewed society "as the unique ground of our triumphs and defeats" (86). James's reputation, however, had risen only with the waning of historically oriented criticism. Where Trilling had vaunted James as the master of social observation, Anderson saw his "various and voluminous world" subdued instead to an imaginative order in which (as with Emerson and Whitman) "the compelling character of history, generational order, places and things leaches out, tends to disappear" (223). Anderson himself sympathized with another strain in American literature, present in Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, Hemingway, and Faulkner, one which accepts "the constraints of associated life," but he focused instead on those who had some affinity with the contemporary fashion of social disaffiliation, represented by the counterculture protest of the 1960s, notably evident at the Morningside Heights campus, where Allen Ginsberg had been a student and where Anderson taught (241). Anderson's important revisions in this thirty-year tradition of interpreting American literature open the door to a more extensive reappraisal of Tocqueville's idea of democratic literature. It may turn out his prophecy will have renewed life for its pertinence to our time rather than to the nineteenth century. The major flaw in his crystal ball was the rigid polarity of an aristocratic interest in the past contrasted to a democratic interest in passions and ideas.33 Both of these interests, however, were always conjoined in the best work of Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville. Tocqueville himself recognized that American literature of the future would have a different character from "the American literature of` today," and he warned that "no one can guess that character beforehand" (441). While describing America, he was always thinking about Europe, and that concern had generated his journey to America. Indeed, America interested him not for itself, but typologically as a society less revolutionary than France and more democratic than England.34 He was an inveterate generalizer, a French trait by his own reckoning, and he knew that "an abstract word is like a box with a false bottom; you may put in it what ideas you please and take them out again unobserved (450). Much of the critical theory of American literature suggests this gaffed box by its exaggeration of the asocial theme in American novels, as if it were the only American strain. Matthiessen, who had introduced Tocquevllle's idea into the discussion of` American classic writers, had a reasonable regard for its limits. But one American critic, who earned three degrees in England, saw the American artist as dieting on "democratic abstractions" that have "no social context."35 Richard Chase, one of Trilling's colleagues, did the most f`or linking the idea of the romance to respect for "the peculiar narrow profoundity" of American classics, but he also unjustly accused them of lacking "a sense of history" as well as "a sense of society and culture."36 This lingering trace of the apologetic tone of the genteel critics proves only that the new critics saw clearly enough the abstractness of the American fictional world; what they often failed to see was that its symbolism was a method f`or exploring historical and cultural issues, rather than for transcending them. The major irony in this astigmatism is that Chase himself scorned myth criticism for ignoring "the whole reality of time and place," which the novel reflects more than other forms, and he had wanted in 1950 "to open up the category of political discussion again" among men of letters. But, characteristically, it was "the idea of pol- itics," rather than any concrete version of it, that he recommended.37 His theory of the romance in The American Novel and Its Tradition tended to desocialize our classics, projecting on them his own abstract cast of mind.Classic American protagonists, whether Deerslayer, Hester Prynne, Ishmael, Huckleberry Finn, Jay Gatsby, or the black Invisible Man, may not be fully a part of their society, but "to be outside society is not to be immune to its claims," as these characters always discover, shuttling to and fro," as an English commentator has pointed out, "between a desire for order and a desire for freedom, a responsibility to the self and a responsibility to society."38 Hawthorne's "psychological romance" (his term) did illustrate Tocqueville's prophecy by departing from literal realism to explore "the truths of the human heart," yet his symbols pointed not beyond history but to events in the moral history of New England. Emerson, Whitman, and Wolfe could have endorsed Tocqueville's point that "the nation itself calls for poetic treatment," but they would not have agreed that "the language, dress, and daily actions of democratic man are repugnant to conceptions of the ideal" (453-55). Tocqueville's hope f`or a democratic poetry was balanced by a fear that poets, "abandoning truth and reality," would "create monsters," ending by describing "an entirely fictitious country" populated by "a fantastic breed of` brainchildren who will make one long for the real world" (457). I suggest that it is the "irrealism" of some "postmodern" writers, obsessed with the fictive nature of contemporary life, who give substance to Tocqueville's fears. Lionel Trilling acutely heard this "irrealistic" note in the modern critic's vivacity when speaking of ''Imaginary gardens with real toads in them" as the essence of poetry. "Indeed," he went on to point out, "we have come to believe that the toad is the less real when the garden is also real."39 An attentive student of postmodern fiction has pertinently observed that "history escaped by Poirier's classic American writers to an elsewhere of language, can also be evaded in a here of 'fictualized' life."40 A nation's discovery of its own literature, as in Canada and Australia today, is a major historical development. One must appreciate therefore, the role of these critics in the midwifery of bringing to birth the widespread recognition of our distinctive literary tradition. "As recently as thirty years ago," Malcolm Cowley remarked in 1954 "the United States had no national classic" in the sense of a work having clustered around it many values discovered in it or added to it by a generation of students, critics, and ordinary readers.4l Even in 1941 H. G. Wells thought it was ridiculous for an American to call himself a professor of American literature.42 In the next twenty-five years American professors would construct a canon in Cowley's sense and prove Wells wrong. If the canon now seems limited and skewed as female critics are the first to charge,43 the owl of Minerva, as Hegel remarked, flies only when the shades of dusk have fallen. American literature had first to be discovered. Now that the discovery is behind us, we can resettle the territory. To "resettle" already means including the black and female writers left out of` the canon because their commitment to the social definition of characters and plot badly squares with Tocqueville's prophecy; it also means the less obvious task of reconsidering the writers traditionally recognized as classic. The Tocqueville-quoting critics have tended to celebrate the writers of the American Renaissance as precursors of the modernists. In effect, they have applied a Puritan topological reading in which the modernists are seen as fulfilling the promise of the classic writers, much as in Puritan readings of` the Bible the Old Testament prefigures the New. By this strategy we have found them pertinent to our own modern concerns at the price of justifying them by their contribution to our own consciousness. We need instead to see their deep engagement with matters of society and history, however abstract their methods. In this light Ralph Allusions lnvisible Man, with its echoing of classic first-person narratives like Moby Dick and Huckleberry Finn, is a pertinent reminder because it condenses the history of black people in their Afro-Americal1 cultural setting, while using techniques of symbolism to dramatize democratic issues akin to Matthiessen's vision of our classic writers. Huck wanted to go to the Territory ahead of the rest, and our Tocquevillean critics have tended to see it as a world elsewhere, but of course it was really Oklahoma, where Ellison grew up. CORNELL UNIVERSITY ...( )... I Cushing Strout, "Tocqueville's Duality: Describing America and Thinking ol` Europe," American Quarterly, 21 (Spring l979), 77-99. 2 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. George Lawrence (New York, 1966), pp. 454-55; hereafter cited in text. 3 Vernon Loggins, I HearAmerica: Literature of theUnlted States Since 19-- (New York, 1937), p. X. 4 Elting E .... ~orlson, In 1 tle Amerlcan ~ e: r .~ v l~ur u~ JI ll~ .. 5 E. Morison (New York, 1958), p. 414. 5 Ser~io Perosa, American Theories of ~ 6 Tocqueville, p. 455; F. O. Matthiessen, The American Renaissance: Art and Expressionin the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York, 1941), p. 544. The first to cite Whitman as proof` of` Tocqueville's prescience was Katherine Harrison in "A French Forecast of American Literature," South Atlantic Quarterly, 25 (1926), 350-60. 7 W. H. Auden, New Year Letter (London, 1942), p. 153. Later Huck and Oliver do illustrate the Anglo-American difference, defining the American mentality as the product "less of conscious political action than of nature...." See "The Anglo-AIllerican Ditfference,"AnchorReview, 1 (1955), 219. 8. Lionel Trilling, , "Family Album," in Speaking of Literature ...( )... (New York, 19~3()), p. 238 and "An American View of Engllsn Lllerature, ...( ).., pp. 262, 265. 9 Stanley Edgar Hyman, The Armed Vision (l. (New York, 1955), p. 122. 10 Leslie Fiedler, "American Literature," in ...( )...(,olltempora~y Sc/lola~ ) A Critif~ll K~ view, ed. Lewis Leary (New York, 1958), p. 157. 11 Edmund Wilson, "The Critic Who Does Not Exist," in The Shores ot Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and Thirties (New York, 1952), pp. 371-72. 12 Charles Feidelson, Symbolism in American Literature (Chicago, 1966), pp. 4, 75-76; hereafter cited in text. 13 Claude Lvi-Strauss, "The Structural Study of Myth," in ...( )... Mvt11: A 5`vmposium, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Bloomington, Ind., 1958), p. 52. 14 Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (Glencoe, Ill., 1960), pp. 110, 288-89. 15 R. W. B. Lewis, T1le American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (C`hicago, 1955), p. 89. Lewis's sensitivity to socially oriented writing is shown by his citing of James Gould Cozzens as "the most neglected of our serious novelists in this century." See his "Contemporary American Literature," in Contemporaru Literary Scholarship, ed. Lewis Leary, p. 215. 16 Daniel Hoffmann,, Form and Fable in American Fiction (New York, 1965). pp. x, xii, 7. 17 Hoffman, p. 9. See Cushing Strout, The American Image of the Old World (New York, 1963), for extensie treatment of "the international theme." 18 Norman Podhoretz, ...( )...l'~ahi~lgIt (New York, 1967), p. 126. 19 Lionel Trilling, "The Situation of the American Intellectual at the Present Time," A Gathering of Fugitives (New York, 1956), pp. 73, 64. 20 William Phillips, ...( )... "C)u. ( oulltry and Our (,ultul e: A Symposium,'' Partisan Review, 19 (1952), 586, 5X9. 21 See lames Burkhart Gilbert, ...( )... Write1s a1ld l'a ti.sall.s: A Histo~ orLite1n~y Radicalism in America (New York, 1968), esp. pp. 161-282. 22 Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness (New York, 1958), pp. xxi, 18. Cf. Van Wyck Brooks, Davs of t~le P~oenix: The Ninetee1l 7wenties I Remember (New York, 1957), p. 154. 23 Lionel Trilling, "Reflections on a Lost Cause," in Speaking of I iterature and Societv, pp. 348-49. 24 "The Limits of the Possible," in -r~le American Imagination: A (,)-itical Su~vey of the Arts f~om the 7imes Litera~ Supl)lement (New York, 1960), p. 36. 25 Henri Peyre, "American Literature Through French Eyes," Virgi1lia Quarterly Review, 23 (1947), 421. 26 Quoted by Pevre, p. 435. 27 Reino Virtanen, "Tocqueville on a Democratic Literature," French Review, 23 (1950), 216. 28 Edwin H. Cady, "The Teacher and the American Novel: 1964," in The Teacherand American Literature, ed. Lewis Leary (Champaign, Ill., 1965), p. 25. 29 Lionel Trilling, "Hawthorne in Our Time," in Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (New York, 1965), p. 199. 3() A. N. Kaul, The American Vision: Actual and Ideal Society.(New Haven, 1963), p. 63. 31 Richard Poirier, A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature (New York, 1966), p. 16; hereafter cited in text. 32 Quentin Anderson, The Imperial Self: An Essay in American Literary and Cultural History (New York, 1971), pp. 86, 229-30; hereafter cited in text. 33 See Cushing Strout, "From Trilling to Anderson: The Strange History of Toc- queville's Idea of a Democratic Poetry," American Quarterly, 24 (1972), 601-6. Cf. Nicolaus Mills, American and English Fiction in the Nineteenth Centurv: An Antigenre Critique and Comparison (Bloomington,.Ind., 1973), p. 23. 34 Franois Furet, "Naissance d'un paradigme: Tocqueville et le ...( )...\ oycl,~,e en a~ e (1~325-1831)," A)~ les: co7~ e, S()cites. Civilisatio-l~. 39, ~o. '~ (~Icll-A~ril 19~4), 225-37. 35 Marius Bewley, The Eccentric Design. 19~)9), p. 15. 36 Richard ~lld~c, lllc ~Id`7`71~, ILClc~ Clll~ Thought, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger,Jr. and Morton White (Boston, 1963), p. 54. Chase by then was worried that an unhistorical entity called "the American imagination would be taken as having been precipitated "once and for all" in its characteristics (p. 68). 37 . ~ II, pp. 245-46 and "Art, Nature, Politics," Kenyon Review, 12 (1950), 593-94. 38 C. W. E. Bigsby, The Second Black Penaissance: Essays in Black Literature (W Conn., 1980), pp. 66, 145. 39 Lionel Trilling, "Willi; The Opposing Self (New York, 1955), p. 83. 40 Charles Caramello, Silverless Mirrors: (Tallahasee, Fla., 1983), p. 91. See also Cushing Strout, "The Fortunes ...( )...ot l ellmg,7 l fle Veracious lmagination: Essays on American History, Literature, and Biograpfly (Middletown, Conn., 1981), pp. 13-14. 41 Malcolm Cowley, The Literary S`ituation (New York, 1955), p. 14. 42 Fred Lewis Pattee, Penn State Yankee (State C,ollege, Pa.. 1953), p. 165. 43 Nina Bavm, "Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of Ameri Exclude Women Authors," American Quarterly 33 (1981), 130-31. Her esay includes Trilling, Bewley, Chase, and Poirier.