630 American Literature
The discourse about American literature did not begin, as the revisionist myth suggests, in the 1930s and 40s. It began after the Revolution to bolster patriotic claims of a distinguished culture for the new nation. Over the intervening years, the consistent feature of this discourse has not, as the New Orthodoxy asserts, been the critical quest for a unique American literary tradition (a notion that comes up infrequently before Matthiessen). Nor has it been its reliance on aesthetic formalism, which has never held the unchallenged sway in American literary studies that its current detractors want to claim for it. In the professional academic study of American literature, aesthetic formalism was only one relatively recent strategy in a long series of attempts to identify what is “American” about American writing. Over the past century, that inquiry has also explored and exhausted spiritual, psychological, economic, and political models of explanation, as each scholarly generation has reshaped the arguments of the last to fit current critical fashion. At each step along the way, American literary scholarship has relied not on any particular critical approach, but on its abiding faith in a mutually sustaining and defining relationship between American writing and American culture. So, the Old Orthodoxy that, in fact, determined the shape of American literary history is both older and more fundamental than the one the New Orthodoxy opposes.
Having misconceived the problem, the New Orthodoxy has also misconceived the solution. American literary scholarship does not need to learn to examine literature in the larger context of general culture, simply because an interest in culture has always dominated work in the field. For example, the problem of explaining the “representativeness” of American literature that proponents of the New Orthodoxy describe as the discovery of a modern criticism more alert than earlier scholarship to social injustice has been a key issue in the two-hundred-year-old conversation about American writing. What the New Orthodoxy describes as consensus was actually a heated, if decorous, debate between competing strategies for making this connection.
The early history of this debate can be traced conveniently in Richard Ruland ed., The Native Muse: Theories of American Literature, vol. I (New York: Dutton, 1972). For a history of early idealist views of America, see Benjamin T. Spencer, The Quest for Nationality (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1957).