¹ Greenblatt, Stephen, The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance (Norman: Pilgrim Books, 1982), 6Google Scholar. For other descriptions of the historicist project see, for example, Howard, Jean E., “Introduction” to Howard, and O'Connor, Marion F., eds., Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology (New York & London: Methuen, 1987), 1–17Google Scholar; Newton, Judith, “History as usual?” Cultural Critique, 9 (Spring 1988), 87–121CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Montrose, Louis, “Renaissance Literary Studies and the Subject of History,” English Literary Renaissance, 16, 1 (1986), 5–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Howard, Jean E., “The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies,” English Literary Renaissance, 16, 1 (1986), 13–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar. An anthology of essays on the subject, The New Historicism, Veeser, H. Aram, ed. (New York & London: Routledge, 1989)Google Scholar appeared too late to be considered in the present essay. Few of the contributions bear directly on the relation of the new historicism to American literary studies, but see Graff, Gerald, “Co-optation,”Google Scholar and Thomas, Brook, “The New Historicism and other Old-fashioned Topics.”Google Scholar

² Gramsci, Antonio, Selections from Prison Notebooks, trans. Hoare, Quintin and Smith, Geoffrey Nowell (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), 172Google Scholar: “What ‘ought to be’ is therefore concrete; indeed it is the only realistic and historicist interpretation of reality, it alone is history in the making and philosophy in the making, it alone is politics.”

³ Cohen, Walter, “Political Criticism of Shakespeare,” in Shakespeare Reproduced, 38.Google Scholar

⁴ See, for example, Porter, Carolyn, “Are We Being Historical Yet?” South Atlantic Quarterly, 87 (Fall 1988), 743–86Google Scholar; Goldberg, Jonathan, “The Politics of Renaissance Literature,” English Literary History, 49 (1982), 514–42.CrossRefGoogle ScholarCohen, Walter, “Political Criticism of Shakespeare,” 36–7Google Scholar, has suggested that “the strangely quietist feel of these radical critiques” might be an effect of post-Vietnam disillusionment. The new historicism has been criticized for a related blindness to feminist initiatives: see, for example, Newton, Judith, “History as usual?”Google Scholar and Waller, Marguerite, “Academic Tootsie: The Denial of Difference and The Difference It Makes,” Diacritics, 17 (Spring 1987), 2–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁵ Greenblatt, Stephen, “Invisible bulletts: Renaissance authority and its subversion, Henry IV and Henry V,” in Dollimore, Jonathan and Sinfield, Alan, eds., Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 45.Google Scholar

⁶ See, especially, Dollimore, Jonathan, “Introduction” to Political ShakespeareGoogle Scholar, and the contributions to that volume. The difference in political emphasis between developments in America and Britain has been widely remarked. See, for example, Cohen, , “Political Criticism of Shakespeare,” 37Google Scholar; Wayne, Don E., “Power, Politics, and the Shakespearean Text,” in Shakespeare Reproduced, 52Google Scholar; Montrose, Louis, “Renaissance Literature and the Subject of History,” 7.Google Scholar

⁷ Davidson, Cathy, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Gilmore, Michael, American Romanticism and the Marketplace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tomkins, Jane, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Porter, Carolyn, Seeing and Being: The Plight of the Participant Observer in Emerson, James, Adams, and Faulkner (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Rogin, Michael, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (New York: Knopf, 1983)Google Scholar; Jehlen, Myra, American Incarnation: The Individual, the Nation, and the Continent (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Michaels, Walter Benn, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).Google Scholar

⁸ See Bercovitch, , “Preface” to Reconstructing American Literature (Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press, 1986), viiiGoogle Scholar, and Bercovitch, and Jehlen, Myra, ed., Ideology and Classic American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 439–40.Google Scholar

⁹ Said, Edward, “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community,” in Mitchell, W. J. T., ed., The Politics of Interpretation (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 26.Google Scholar

¹⁰ See, for example, Lentricchia, Frank, After the New Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Ryan, Michael, Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982)Google Scholar. The bracketing of history in the work of the Yale critics is, as both books show, a particular misappropriation of Derrida's claim that “There is nothing outside of the text” (Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976], 158). Derrida has observed that “The reader does not interpret freely, taking into account only his own reading, excluding the author, the historical period in which the text appeared, and so on” (Kearns, James and Newton, Ken, “An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” Literary Review, 14 (04–05 1980), 22.Google Scholar

¹¹ Wayne, Don E., “Gnosis without Praxis: on the Dissemination of European Criticism and Theory in the United States,” Helios, n.s., 7, 2 (Spring 1980), 6Google Scholar. See also Said, Edward, “Reflections on Recent American ‘Left’ Literary Criticism,” boundary 2, 8 (Fall 1979), 16CrossRefGoogle Scholar: “The literary work for [Paul de Man] stands in a position of almost unconditional superiority over historical facticity not by virtue of its power but in a sense by virtue of its powerlessness.”

¹² The principal anthologies are Michaels, Walter Benn and Pease, Donald, eds., The American Renaissance Reconsidered (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Bercovitch, , ed., Reconstructing American Literary HistoryGoogle Scholar; Bercovitch, and Jehlen, , eds., Ideology and Classic American Literature.Google Scholar For an important account of the new Cambridge History project, see Bercovitch, , “The Problem of Ideology in American Literary History,” Critical Inquiry, 12 (Summer 1986), 631–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹³ “The Problem of Ideology in American Literary History,” 631.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Jehlen, Myra, “Introduction” to Ideology and Classic American Literature, 2.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Arac, Jonathan, “F. O. Matthiessen: Authorizing an American Renaissance,” New Political Science, 15 (Summer 1986), 21–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This is a revised version of the essay published in The American Renaissance Reconsidered. Compare Pease, Donald, Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 246–8.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Slotkin, Richard, “Myth and the Production of History,” in Ideology and Classic American Literature, 80.Google Scholar

¹⁷ As in Bercovitch, Sacvan, “Hawthorne's A-Morality of Compromise,” Representations, 24 (Fall 1988), 1–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁸ Tomkins, Jane, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 200.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Ibid., 147–85.

²⁰ Ibid., 124. Comparable claims are made for the genre in Davidson, Cathy, Revolution and the Word, 140, 151Google Scholar, and Fisher, Philip, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 99.Google Scholar

²¹ Reynolds, David S., Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York: Knopf, 1988), 119.Google Scholar Further references will be given in the text.

²² See Baker, Houston A. Jr., “Figurations for a New American Literary History,” Ideology in Classic American Literature, 145–71.Google Scholar

²³ See Michaels, Walter Benn, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, 174–75Google Scholar, on the need to shift “the focus of literary history from the individual text or author to structures whose coherence, interest, and effect may be greater than that of either author or text.”

²⁴ As examples, see Sundquist, Eric, Home as Found: Authority and Genealogy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979)Google Scholar and Rogin, Michael, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (New York: Knopf, 1983).Google Scholar

²⁵ See Thomas, Brook, Cross-examinations of Law and Literature: Cooper, Hawthorne, Stowe and Melville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gilmore, Michael, American Romanticism and the MarketplaceGoogle Scholar; Michaels, Walter Benn, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism.Google Scholar

²⁶ Kenneth S. Lynn, Review of Lears, T. J. Jackson, No Place of Grace, New York Times Book Review, 10 01 1982, 9.Google Scholar

²⁷ Crews, Frederic, “Whose American Renaissance?” New York Review of Books, 27 10 1988, 68–81.Google Scholar

²⁸ A tendency also noted by Denning, Michael, “The Special American Conditions: Marxism and American Studies,” American Quarterly, 38 (1986), 356–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Eagleton, Terry, “The Idealism of American Criticism,” New Left Review, 127 (05–06 1981), 53–65.Google Scholar

²⁹ Arac, Jonathan, “The Politics of The Scarlet Letter,” Ideology and Classic American Literature, 262 (his emphasis)Google Scholar. Kaplan, Amy, “Naturalism with a Difference,” American Quarterly, 40 (12 1988), 584CrossRefGoogle Scholar, observes a similarly “spatial” tendency in Michaels's The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism.

³⁰ Bercovitch gives a bibliography of relevant theoretical material in Ideology and Classic American Literature, 443–6.Google Scholar

³¹ “The Problem of Ideology in American Literary History,” 635.Google Scholar For Bercovitch, as for Greenblatt, the theory of Althusser is arguably less important than that of Geertz, for whom the problem of consciousness remains central; see his The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 220 for the famous description of ideologies as “maps of problematic social reality and matrices for the creation of collective consciousness.”Google Scholar

³² Compare Myra Jehlen, “Introduction,” 5, on ideology “as an interpretive, indeed a linguistic, construction in many ways analogous to literature itself.” For a more properly materialist view, see Therborn, Göran, The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology (London: Verso, 1980), 72Google Scholar: ideologies operate “not as possessions or texts but as ongoing social processes. It is precisely as such processes that they interpellate or address us; and the rarest form of interpellation is the one implicit in the traditional historiography of ideas, namely, an elaborate written text speaking directly to a solitary reader” (his emphases).

³³ Bercovitch, Sacvan, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), xiii, 179Google Scholar; further references will be given in the text.

³⁴ Reconstructing American Literary History, viii.Google Scholar

³⁵ “Afterword,” Ideology and Classic American Literature, 433Google Scholar. Mannheim, Karl, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1936), 183Google Scholar: “The Utopias of ascendant classes are often, to a large extent, permeated with ideological elements.”

³⁶ “Afterword,” 434 (his emphases).Google Scholar

³⁷ “Hawthorne's A-Morality of Compromise,” 12.Google Scholar

³⁸ “Afterword,” 435.Google Scholar

³⁹ “The Problem of Ideology in American Literary History,” 646.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Baym, Nina, Review of The American Jeremiad and The Puritan Origins of the American Self, Nineteenth Century Fiction, 34 (12 1979), 352Google Scholar. See also Reising, Russell J., The Unusable Past: Theory and the Study of American Literature (New York & London: Methuen, 1986), 74–88.Google Scholar

⁴¹ Williams, Raymond, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 112.Google Scholar Williams's warnings about the misuse of the concept of hegemony are especially relevant in view of Bercovitch's claims for an “unmediated relation between social structure and social ideal” as characteristic of American culture (The American Jeremiad, 204–205; his emphasis).Google Scholar

⁴² See the account of this “double articulation” in Laclau, Ernesto, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (London: New Left Books, 1977), 108–15.Google Scholar See also ibid., 195: “Classes only exist as hegemonic forces to the extent that they can articulate popular interpellations to their own discourse.”

⁴³ The example is also used in Jameson, Frederic, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, 1981), 86.Google Scholar Jameson similarly warns against models of the “total system” which “would seem slowly and inexorably to eliminate any possibility of the negative as such, and to reintegrate the place of an oppositional or even ‘critical’ practice and resistance back into the system as the latter's mere inversion” (91; his emphasis).

⁴⁴ American Incarnation, 51Google Scholar: “In America…at least through the nineteenth century the dominant culture seems to have been able to coopt alternative and oppositional forms with unusual effectiveness, to the point of appearing to preclude even their possibility.” Further references will be given in the text.

⁴⁵ The same argument is advanced in Jehlen's, earlier “New World Epics: The Middle Class Novel in America” (1977)Google Scholar, rpt. in Ideology and Classic American Literature, 125–44.Google Scholar Carolyn Porter's Seeing and Being mounts a full-scale counter-argument against this simplistic and fundamentally ahistorical view.

⁴⁶ Jehlen's reading of Pierre accordingly emphasizes the power of filiopiety to inhibit historical change, and she concludes that “History proceeds by unfolding, but the returning pattern of incest instead rewinds society in a narrowing spiral whose center and ultimate goal, both, is the patricidal patriarch.” Compare Pease, Donald, Visionary Compacts, 36Google Scholar: “the Revolutionary mythos threatened to translate all of American life into a compulsive reenactment of a single national event.” For an interestingly different, because more clearly historicized, exploration of the thematics of emulation and filiopiety, see Breitweiser, Mitchell, Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin: The price of representative personality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).Google Scholar

⁴⁷ See Bercovitch, , “Afterword,” 454Google Scholar: “if the culture, that is, combines the conditions of modernization in the United State with the principles of liberal democracy, then the need to preclude alternatives a priori assumes special urgency.”

⁴⁸ See Larrain, Jorge, The Concept of Ideology (London: 1979), 122Google Scholar for a strong presentation of the view that “In Marx ideology has a historical character, as it is directly related to the evolution of social contradictions and economic forms.” See Poulantzas, Nicos, Political Power and Social Classes, trans. O'Hagan, Timothy (London: Verso, 1978), 207Google Scholar: “at the level of experience the social whole remains opaque to the agents. In class-divided societies this opacity is over-determined by class exploitation and by the forms which this exploitation takes in order to be able to function in the social whole.”

⁴⁹ It is worth noting too that several modes of production co-exist at any one time, a point which is concealed by an emphasis on “middle-class hegemony” as if to suggest that this also constitutes the whole social formation. For a useful distinction between these terms, see Poulantzas, , Social Power and Social Classes, 15.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ Michaels's book is the second volume to be published in Stephen Greenblatt's series “The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics.”

⁵¹ The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, 35. Further references will be given in the text.Google Scholar

⁵² One might expect David Reynold's study of what lay “beneath the American Renaissance” to produce a stronger conflictual sense of nineteenth-century culture. Yet while Reynolds nods in the direction of working-class popular culture (characterized as “boisterous” and “rowdy” [25, 151]), he nowhere considers the class-composition of the general readership of the time. One might say that he totalizes the notion of audience simply because he never really interrogates it.

⁵³ See Michaels, , 178Google Scholar: “…to speak of the interest of the money economy is hardly to get rid of the subject; it is instead to relocate it, to inscribe it at the level not of the individual or the class but of the economy.” Kaplan, Ann, “Naturalism with a Difference,” 586Google Scholar, notes Michaels's failure to see beyond “the perspective of the market, where individuals meet as free equal agents”; she also (589 n.3) comments on Michaels's “synchronic approach” to economic questions.

⁵⁴ Michaels, , 18Google Scholar, notes a similar criticism by Rachel Bowlby of an earlier version of the chapter on Sister Carrie but he does not confront the argument systematically.

⁵⁵ The Political Unconscious, 102.Google Scholar