The more things stay the same, the more they change. That paradox might well sum up a comparison of the new Columbia Literary History of the United States (1988) with its postwar predecessor, Literary History of the United States (1946). As a measure of recent critical approaches to American realism and naturalism, the Columbia History offers a convenient frame of reference; indeed, many of the authors who contributed chapters relevant to this discussion (Brodhead, Fisher, Rowe, and Sundquist, for example) would also figure prominently in any bibliography of recent work in the field. One could hardly assert, however, that these critics (or the others gathered into part 3 of the Columbia History, which covers the years 1865- 1910) bear a consistently oedipal relation to their counterparts in Literary History of the United States.