Volume 35, Number 16 · October 27, 1988
Whose American Renaissance?
By Frederick C. Crews
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY
American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman
by F.O. Matthiessen
Oxford University Press, 678 pp., $18.95 (paper)
The American Renaissance Reconsidered: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1982-83
edited by Walter Benn Michaels, edited by Donald E. Pease
Johns Hopkins, 217 out of print pp.
The Unusable Past: Theory and the Study of American Literature
by Russell J. Reising
Methuen, 290 pp., $11.95 (paper)
Ideology and Classic American Literature
edited by Sacvan Bercovitch, edited by Myra Jehlen
Cambridge University Press, 451 pp., $12.95 (paper)
Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context
by Donald E. Pease
University of Wisconsin Press, 303 pp., $15.50 (paper)
Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860
by Jane Tompkins
Oxford University Press, 236 pp., $9.95 (paper)
Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville
by David S. Reynolds
Knopf, 625 pp., $35.00
Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel
by Philip Fisher
Oxford University Press, 191 pp., $9.95 (paper)
Every few decades, in any given field of literary study, we can expect the publication of a multivolume collaborative history that will come to be known as the standard reference work. Typically, its chapters are parceled out to eminences who have long ruled the acknowledged fiefdoms of that scholarly realm and who, to the amusement of reviewers, appear to contradict one another wherever they touch on the same topics. These 'picaresque adventures in pseudocausality,' as Geoffrey Hartman once called them, these 'handbooks with footnotes which claim to sing of the whole but load every rift with glue,'[1] are tolerated precisely so long as they are perceived to be patchwork creations. A time comes, however, when another generation begins to see what is really standard about the standard guide—namely, the unwitting conformity of all its contributors to deep-seated assumptions that have come to be thought pernicious. A sharply divergent major effort is sure to follow soon thereafter.
Review, 9515 words
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