A Cultural History of the American Novel: Henry James to William Faulkner

David Minter’s A Cultural History of the American Novel offers a valuable blend of the old and the new. It returns to a classic but neglected synthesis of literature, intellectual and social history, and literary criticism to discuss the currently unfashionable notion of American culture in its entirety. However, the book also talks about literature, history, and culture with the younger generation’s concern for political correctness, language, and difference.

In fact, the older understanding and method involving historical and cultural context and literary text is so neglected that it barely finds acknowledgment in this book that revives it. Minter readily notes the influence on the modern novel of sociology, linguistics, and anthropology; little mention, however, is made of the more immediate tradition of figures in American literary scholarship and American studies who preceded Minter in striving to relate literature and culture. When Minter proclaims that words provide the key to culture, he seems close to F. O. Matthiessen’s declaration in American Renaissance (1941) that an artist’s style and use of language indicate his or her attitude toward cultural history. Similarly, it seems strange to overlook the writers after Matthiessen, such as Henry Nash Smith, Leo Marx, and Lionel Trilling, who articulated a theory of language that incorporates history and the social sciences.

Conceivably, a new ideological predilection feeds this memory lapse. Perhaps to distinguish his position from this earlier body of work, Minter stresses his identification with the “victims” of American history and culture.

One conviction that grew in me as I wrote this book, for example, is this: that despite the varied dreams and the many experiences of success that mark the culture of the United States, the burden of our history teaches us that we should not speak of that success unless we are prepared to confront its costs by seeing it as its victims—those sacrificed for it or excluded from it—saw it.

[xvi]

This elevation of victimization to a theory of history and culture provides a necessary correction to the work of scholars like Smith, who admitted late in his career that Virgin Land, his classic literary and historical study of the West in the American imagination, sadly neglected the tragic fate of Native Americans and overlooked the treatment of women. Nevertheless, the theme of victimization in Minter’s study also suggests a dilemma facing current scholars. Whereas an earlier generation of liberal thinkers and critics probably would have relied upon some amalgamation of Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx to explain domination and freedom in society and to account for the connection between aesthetics and history, Minter’s ideology of victimization makes no systematic distinctions concerning class, economics, and society in America and proffers no clear direction for change. Ultimately, the logic of this argument turns almost all Americans into victims, raising other questions about the source of American optimism, power, success, and leadership. Since the period of this study has been characterized by many as an age of reform, the opportunity to find victims in the decades from Henry James to William Faulkner seems endless; the paradoxes of American political and economic history require a more complex paradigm of analysis.

If Minter’s project of uniting history and aesthetics is not as new as it first appears and if the challenge to devise a theory of art and ideology poses more problems than can be resolved immediately in one work, his overall achievement in A Cultural History of the American Novel remains significant. It gives contemporary scholars and students a desperately needed sense of place and position from which to view and understand the origins of our dominant literary and intellectual tradition. Here Minter brings together the vast body of literary works in realism, naturalism, and modernism and relates them to the major intellectual and social trends of their day. To the best of my knowledge, not since Jay Martin’s Harvests of Change: American...