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Revisionist scholars in other fields have proven capable of a far more sustained confrontation with the current critical doubts. New Historicist scholarship by such scholars as Louis Montrose, Stephen Greenblatt, and Richard Helgerson in Renaissance studies, or Jerome McGann, Marjorie Levinson, and John Turner in British Romanticism has met the unsettling displacement of historical positivism and aesthetic formalism with a willingness to prove the implications of fortuitous relationships between cultural practices and literary expression. That willingness seems freely to admit their uncertainty about the connection, in a post-modernist world, between literature and culture. Such admissions, however, have never been easy for Americanists. They have been banned both by Americanists’ long-standing preoccupation with national cultural origins and by their need to achieve respectability in a largely skeptical profession.
Although American literary studies shares with literary studies in general the need to rethink mimesis, to develop new terms for the relationship of literature and life, for Americanists that problem has always been particularly compelling. Because of their historical allegiance to cultural values associated with the nation, Americanists have felt, even more acutely than literary historians in other fields, the need for persuasive answers to increasingly troubling questions about what connects particular cultural practices to culture at large, what links text and context. But a premature security about such issues comes at a price. For example, the myth of American literary scholarship that underwrites the New Orthodoxy can seem so neat only by excluding half of the history it aims to describe and thus necessarily oversimplifying the critical debates that have enlivened scholarship in American literature over the past one hundred years.