literature may be supposed to coexist. As Leo Marx has said, however, these "large collective mental formations . . . seem unmoored- a ghostly, free-floating cloud of abstractions only distantly related, like the casting of a shadow," to the actual products of human behavior they purport to explain. Because they are purely conceptual, they can attain historical status, a semblance of continuous objective existence, only through reification. And, once reified, of course, they can seem to account for, even to cause, the phenomena that generated the conception in the first place. To be sure, these "ambitious schemes," as Warner Berthoff once called them, have produced the most influential studies of American literature to date. Nevertheless, they have merely imagined what they could not discover: some actual common ground on which the divided realms of literature and history might be united.
II
The problem of American literary history has a history of its own, one exactly as long as that of the idea of American literature itself. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, according to Claudio Guillen, the renaissance and enlightenment conception of literature as a timeless whole, grounded in a universal poetics and rhetoric, was shattered by an erupting interest in individuality, which emphasized the differences among literary periods. "The main consequence" of this upheaval, guillen argues, "Was a serial view of literature as a chronological succession of individual works and writers. To counteract this seriality and compensate for the loss of an independent focus found in poetics or poetry itself, literary historians were forced to form new alliances and seek outside means of support. The concept of the nation, regarded by definition as an organic whole, growing and developing in history, became the all-embracing principle of unity."