among a professoriate committed to the idea of a unique American literary tradition. Indeed, almost no one complained when Chase's followers avoided the questions of Americanness and historical continuity altogether by merely subjecting a succession of American masterpieces to the same sort of critical analysis without saying anything at all about what makes them American or relates them historically to each other. To cite only one example of the hundreds available: Donald B. Stauffer's A short history of American poetry (1974) is neither short, at 450 pages; nor a history, since it offers no definition of its subject that would enable us to see different poems as episodes in the development of this supposedly continuous entity; nor a study of "American poetry," since it does not explain what makes these particular poems either uniquely or characteristically American- and ought properly to have been called A long collection of critical essays on selected poems in English by some well-known American writers.
Dissatisfaction with the choice between turning literary works into historical documents and turning history into a convenient fiction has led our third class of American literary historians to seek a mediatory position between the divided realms of literature and history. Samuel Knapp located this middle ground between the covers of his own book, which huddled together this "Lectures on American Literature" and his "Passages of American History," Norman Foerster removed it to the mid of the ideal scholar-critic, who evaluates his materials critically even as he treats them historically. Later Americanists, seeking a more perfect union between these warring states, have posited a sort of ideal universe- variously called "mind," "culture," "experience," "dream," "myth," and "ideology" - in which both history and