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G. R. Thompson and Eric Carl Link. Neutral Ground: New Traditionalism and the American Romance Controversy.-

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G. R. Thompson and Eric Carl Link. Neutral Ground: New Traditionalism and the American Romance Controversy. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press. 1999. xvii + 267 pp.

A recurrent preoccupation of our novelists, the Sins of the Fathers, have also been much on the minds of our literary historians. Hence successive versions of American literary history have tended to fall dialectically into generational sequences of apparent broad accord followed by passionate rejection both of the accord and its fashioners and eventually by partial rehabilitation of the fathers and vindication of the sons and daughters. Of no phase of American literary historiography has this been more true than that which commenced with the myth-symbol-and-formalism consensus of the 1950s--a consensus doubtless more apparent to hindsight than real and represented mainly by the handful of powerful works that proved most influential. That decade began with Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950) and ended with Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), with such seminal books as Charles Feidelson's Symbolism and American Literature (1953), R.W.B. Lewis's The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (1955), Perry Miller's Errand into the Wilderness (1956), and Richard Chase's The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957) sandwiched in between. Has any decade before or since produced so many powerful and influential totalizing narratives of American literature and culture?

Yet it can be argued that the great Americanists who created them thereby recapitulated the sin of American thinkers dating back to the days of Bradford and Captain John Smith who have been infatuated with over-arching historical schemas that explain, partly because they overlook, so much. Chase has proven especially vulnerable to such criticism because of the exclusionary tendencies of his Hawthorne-inspired argument that the great tradition of the American novel is to be found in its romance-novels--works characterized by inclinations toward gothic melodrama, irony, narrow but deep moral and metaphysical vision, complex narrative artistry, focus on the individual's rather than society's problems, and the...

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