This study of American literary history deals with the making and breaking of boundaries in literary criticism. It focuses on literary criticism from roughly 1900 to 1950, but both the subject and the chronological period have proven hard to abide by. Many of the major literary critics of the first five decades of this century viewed themselves as more than literary: literary criticism was one area in which they exercised their authority as interpreters of and commentators on the culture. They addressed social, political, and cultural issues that writers and critics of the previous century had considered, and that still others explored during the 1950s and afterwards. The years from 1900 to 1950 thus mark one stage in a complex debate about the function and fate of criticism in America that began long ago and has not concluded.

The question of boundaries becomes especially important for the literary historian writing about the early 1900s and beyond because this was the period when American literature took shape as a subject and scholarly field. Before 1900, there was little organized sense of an American literature. Nor were there compelling accounts of why this literature mattered, what its chief preoccupations and traditions were, and what kinds of utility and value it possessed for the present. The case for American literature was made inside and outside the academy during the years from 1900 to 1950, and it stands as one of the most formidable achievements of modernism.

In my first chapter, I treat the process by which American literature came into being, noting the calls for American literary independence that Emerson, Whitman, and their contemporaries advanced in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s and that Van Wyck Brooks, H. L. Mencken, and many others echoed sixty to seventy years later during the progressive era.