American Literature

Literary criticism in the 20th century began with the neo-humanists, who upheld the classical tradition and called for a firmer ethical basis for art. These theories were expounded by such critics as Paul Elmer More (1864-1937; Shelburne Essays, 11 vols., 1904-1921), William Crary Brownell (1851-1928; American Prose Masters, 1909), and the Harvard University professor Irving Babbitt (The New Laokoön, 1910). The appraisal of American writing as a distinct national literature began in the 1920s, introduced by the English novelist D. H. Lawrence in his groundbreaking Studies in Classic American Literature (1923). The American scholar Vernon Louis Parrington provided a socio-political interpretation of American literature in his treatise Main Currents in American Thought (3 vols., 1927-1930). A more popular survey of American letters was contributed by the literary historian Van Wyck Brooks in his multivolume series beginning with The Flowering of New England, 1815-1865 (1936). Coincident with these studies was the direct assault unleashed by H. L. Mencken in his American Mercury reviews, 1924-1933, on contemporary tastes and prejudices of what he called the American “boobocracy”.

From the professional scholars of literature came, between the late 1930s and 1945, an approach known as the New Criticism. Taking its name from a 1941 essay by John Crowe Ransom, it emphasized close analysis of text and structure rather than consideration of social or biographical contexts. Among the critics expounding these tenets were Cleanth Brooks, Kenneth Burke, Ransom, Alan Tate, and Robert Penn Warren. Independent of this approach were several notable scholars, including Joseph Wood Krutch, whose essays were collected in The Modern Temper (1929) and The Measure of Man (1954); and Lionel Trilling, author of one of the most influential of modern critical essays, The Liberal Imagination (1950). Also noteworthy were Malcolm Cowley, author of Exile's Return (1934); Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (1942) and The Inmost Leaf (1955); and Leslie Fiedler, whose Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) provided a new interpretation of certain themes and approaches.

Perhaps the best-rounded literary critic and theorist to emerge in 20th-century America was Edmund Wilson. Independent of mind, widely erudite yet never drily pedantic, he remained unaligned with formal academic criticism. His study Axel's Castle (1931) indicated a mature, sensitive literary intelligence, and such later critical works as The Wound and the Bow (1941) and The Bit Between My Teeth: A Literary Chronicle of 1950-1965 (1965) confirmed his stature.

The work of French theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault increasingly influenced criticism during the 1970s and 1980s, giving rise to the Yale school of deconstructionist criticism. This work is best represented by the collection Deconstruction and Criticism, edited by many of the leading practitioners such as J. Hillis Miller and Geoffrey H. Hartman. Steven Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), Shakespearean Negotiations (1988), has been the leading force in New Historicist criticism, which argues that the best way to interpret literature is to place it in its historical context.