Neutral Ground: New Traditionalism and the American Romance Controversy (review)

Describing the transformative effect of moonlight, “a medium the most suitable for a romance-writer,” Nathaniel Hawthorne observes that “the floor of our familiar room has become a neutral territory somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other.” Hawthorne’s discussion of the romance writer in “The Custom House” occupies a central position in the debate about the genres of the romance and the novel in U.S. literary history. In Neutral Ground: New Traditionalism and the American Romance Controversy, G. R. Thompson and Eric Carl Link undertake a study of the “American romance controversy” and the implications for contemporary literary study. Hawthorne’s “neutral territory” becomes the “neutral ground” of Thompson and Link’s title. As such, this study is at once a literary history based on impressive research, especially of nineteenth-century periodical literature; a forceful if occasionally shrill critique of the “New Americanists”; and a brief but spirited argument for the “New Traditionalism,” with its interest in history and both new and older forms of criticism.

Thompson and Link begin their study with a discussion of Richard Chase’s The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957), the departure point for many recent critiques of the canon of American literature as shaped by mid-twentieth-century critics. Arguing that “New Americanists,” like Nina Baym and especially Donald Pease, have distorted both the nineteenth-century debate over the romance and the works of New Critics, the authors attempt to “reconfigure” the romance controversy along “historical” lines. That history begins with an examination of Hawthorne’s discussions of the romance and moves both backward and forward in time to demonstrate that Hawthorne was not inventing a distinction but was in fact participating in a long Anglo-American tradition.

The strength of this study is in the authors’ detailed examination of historical sources surrounding the nineteenth-century distinctions between romance and novel. Thompson and Link offer a meticulous account of a variety of views, including British perspectives on the importance of Sir Walter Scott in discussions of romance, as well as those of Americans like William Gilmore Simms. An invaluable resource in the book is an extensive bibliography of European and American commentary on romance from 1650 to 1910.

While careful to offer astute commentary on the nuances of the primarily new critical arguments of Chase, F. O. Matthiesen, Lionel Trilling, and others, Thompson and Link have a tendency to treat the “New Americanists” rather generally and generically as “ahistorical,” “revisionist,” and possessed by strongly felt agendas such as feminism and cold-war critiques of U.S. culture. Such characterizations of the “New Americanists” perhaps invite attention to the political agenda lurking in the call for a “New Traditionalism,” by which Thompson and Link claim simply to mean a closer study of the past. Nonetheless, their book offers not only provocative evidence for the fact that the romance controversy still matters but also confirmation of just how much is at stake in the ongoing debate over the contested territory charted in Neutral Ground.