It is a curiosity of modern scholarship that the only general work on antebellum Southern Romanticism is Rollin G. Osterweis' Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South, which has been in print since 1949, is still read, and still –if only for want of a competitor –used. Yet much has changed in understanding of the social and intellectual history of the Old South, and even more of the phenomenon of Romanticism. These changes, natural enough over the span of two intellectual generations, have made many of that book's presumptions questionable; so a second look at the problem seems worthwhile, to clear the ground and to indicate fresh directions. For Osterweis wrote within the assumptions of the 1940s about the nature and shortcomings of Romanticism. He was guided by Irving Babbitt, who scorned Romanticism as a puling and exaggerated passion instigated by Rousseau, a disaster for rational men: at best silly, as with the jousts of antebellum Virginia; at worst dangerous, as with the secession convention of South Carolina. But Osterweis was Babbitt with a difference. While Babbitt and, more weightily, Ernst Cassirer had thought that Romanticism had led the world astray and it was still astray, with Hitler the avatar of Hegel as chilling evidence, Osterweis cheerily regarded Romanticism as a movement that had expired with the nineteenth century, a fossil safe to mock. To this perspective, largely adopted from Jacques Barzun's Romanticism and the Modern Ego (1943), Osterweis added the view of Arthur Lovejoy, who had insisted that Romanticism, while possessing a core notion of diversity and flux, should most safely be regarded as multiple: there were Romanticisms, not a Romanticism.

The explanations for the red scare of the Cold War years have often been concerned with the direction taken by anti-Communist pressures. These have sometimes been represented as welling up from below, perhaps in the form of grassroots anxieties and resentments directed at well-to-do liberals and intellectuals, or as Catholic and immigrant enmity towards the Soviet Union. Such populistic currents may be portrayed as disturbing the normal routines of American politics. More often in recent years anti-Communist sentiments have been presented as elite-inspired influences working their way down in the polity, such as the anti-Soviet rhetoric and policies of the Truman administration, or the partisan opportunism of Republican politicians. The American political process itself may then be held to account. There have been a few attempts to test these interpretations by studies at state level, although it is not self-evident that such studies will favour either of these explanations. Indeed, the more detailed the study the more it is likely to acknowledge the complexity of American anti-communism. The evidence of California suggests that the second great red scare arose out of the convergence of pressures both from above and from below, in a process involving at least three different political dimensions.

When you shake his hand, do you already know? Before you ask whether she has done anything political, can you guess in which party she would have done it? The political parties, even American political parties, are different. They offer different issue positions, on economic policy, on foreign policy, on social policy. They represent different interests as well, different classes, different regions, different ethnic and racial groups. Yet there is something else about these parties, something quite apart from issues and interests, which makes the direct observer believe that he can tell the Republicans from the Democrats, even when he is at the country club, or at the corner bar.

If a pregnant woman in the United States wishes to terminate her pregnancy, she may do so unimpeded by the state during the first trimester of the pregnancy, so long as the termination is performed by a registered medical practitioner. In the second trimester, she must have closer consultation with her physician than in the first three months, but the choice of an abortion still resides with her. State interest in that period may be concerned only with the safety of the procedure for the mother since abortion during the second trimester is more life-threatening to the mother than in the first. Only in the last trimester of her pregnancy does the state interest in that choice become paramount because the state finds itself in the position of being advocate for the foetus which, in thelater stages of pregnancy, may be viable outside of the mother's womb.

When a white writer portrays a black character, racial stereotypes and literary patterns almost always reveal their power. The portraits of blacks take forms that are by now archetypal: the mammy, Stepin Fetchit, the buck, the unspoiled primitive, the member of the oppressed black proletariat…. Such forms come all too easily to white writers; but “modern realism,” as Erich Auerbach called it, comes hard. Thus, white writers can seldom present a “tragically conceived life” of a black character and set that life solidly in a black culture. In portraying blacks, white writers tend toward the sentimental, the satiric, and the didactic rather than “objective seriousness, which seeks to penetrate to the depths of the passions and entanglements of a human life, but without itself becoming moved, or at least without betraying that it is moved” (Auerbach, 457 and 490). Although William Faulkner often tumbles – and sometimes leaps – into those pitfalls, occasionally he avoids them altogether. When he does so, however, readers find his work particularly hard to understand. His story “That Evening Sun” is a case in point.

Discussion of the American Revolution began at the beginning. Contemporaries identified two interactive, though not interlocked, major elements by boasting of the attainment of independence and the founding of a new republic; as Enos Hitchcock insisted in 1788, “A revolution can never be considered as complete till government is firmly established — and without this independency would be a curse instead of a blessing. — These jointly were the great object of the American Revolution.” A third component of the Revolutionary experience was a network of social changes that affected many aspects of American life. Some processes — demographic growth, economic expansion, and western settlement, all of which contributed materially to the context of Revolutionary change — were essentially secular and developmental in effect. Others, such as the emancipation of blacks and women, had barely begun during the Revolutionary era; a few, for example, the disestablishment of religion, were largely complete by the end of the century. Among these many social processes was one that interacted with both other components of the Revolution, was central in function, and had both immediate and long-term effects. Elites were forced to share their power.

By 1800 a critical change had taken place in the fabric of American society. The Revolution had transformed ideological expectations, behaviour patterns and social relationships as well as institutions, and had drastically altered the basis on which social and political authority could be exercised in a manner that transcended the departure of British officials and Loyalist exiles.

In 1911, at the age of fifty-one, Harriet Monroe of Chicago decided to seek in that city sponsorship for a magazine devoted solely to the publication and criticism of poetry. It was a bold project, if not an unlikely one. America had never had such a journal. Chicago had a reputation as the graveyard of little magazines. There appeared to be scant supply of good new poetry and less demand. Moreover, it was doubtful that Chicago's intermittent patronage of the arts could be diverted from the publicly prestigious forums of the Art Institute and the Chicago Symphony.

When James K. Polk entered the White House in March 1845 all but a small minority of politicians acted and voted in accordance with the stated principles of one of two major parties. These parties were emphatically national in scope; each won support from all sections of the Union. Sixteen years later when it was the turn of Abraham Lincoln to enter the White House the situation was dramatically altered. Seven states from the Deep South had left the Union, four of the Upper South states were soon to follow. As the firing began at Fort Sumter, northerners of all parties rallied to the defence of the Union. A party system genuinely national in scope had been supplanted by sectional conflict that was about to erupt into Civil War.

A key stage in this process occurred when northern Democrats challenged what seemed to be the increasingly evident southern dominance of their party. For many Democrats disillusionment did not come until close to the end of the decade. These Democrats remained within their party and supported Douglas in 1860. They were nevertheless by this time bitter in their denunciations of the South and the resolute defenders of the Union in the aftermath of secession.

Chicken-farmer, shoe-worker, bobbin-boy, messenger, teacher, journalist, leather-worker, poet, student, cultural ambassador, berry-picker, lecturer. Such a list does not even exhaust Robert Frost's occupations, let alone his ambitions. In fact, when he writes in “Two Tramps in Mud Time” that

My object in living is to unite

My avocation and my vocation

As my two eyes make one in sight

it is tempting to see here a sly joke at his own expense. For Frost had so many vocations and avocations that they are well-nigh impossible to combine in any clear-sighted unity. “No poet in this century has written more poems involving more different kinds of work than Frost,” writes William H. Pritchard, before going on to list some of the jobs which Frost found and abandoned between 1885 and 1892. Even the many jobs he did do were insufficient to content him. “I should have been an archaeologist,” he wrote to A. J. Armstrong in 1943 and though Frost as an extremely successful poet might allow himself that ironic wistfulness, he was not being merely whimsical. If some of his family were drawn into the darker sides of his poetry, then they also enacted a few of his brighter dreams. Welcoming Willard E. Fraser as a new son-in-law in 1932, Frost proposes not one but four desired careers.

When Thomas Jefferson said in his 1801 Inaugural Address, “We are all republicans: we are all federalists,” he was attempting to reconcile the differences between the two political parties and make a bid for Federalist support. He could not have realized then that one of the greatest threats to political achievement in his second administration would not come from friction between the established parties, but from one individual who styled himself and his small circle of followers as a “third something” between Republicans and Federalists. During Jefferson's first term certain issues arose which caused a growing dissatisfaction with administration policies among a few party members. Chief among that small, disaffected faction (commonly called the “Tertium Quids” because they claimed to be “third something”) was John Randolph of Roanoke – one of the most capable and consistent representatives who ever took the oath of office. Although Randolph's announcement of his willingness to meet men on that ground called quiddism came in 1806 during debates on non-importation of goods from Great Britain, his personal war with Jefferson had already evolved through a series of issues which emphasized their emerging differences on how political theory, purity and principle should be put into practice. By early 1806 Randolph's break with the administration was inevitable and reconciliation impossible.

Who won the Lincoln–Douglas election of 1858? is a question that has frequently been pondered by historians. This is not surprising, since the campaign of 1858 in Illinois was, in David Potter's words, “perhaps the most famous local political contest in American history.” It made Abraham Lincoln's national reputation, though Lincoln had enjoyed strong support in his run for the Senate in 1855, and had been a respectable midwestern candidate for the Republicans' vice-presidential nomination in 1856. It also confirmed Senator Stephen A. Douglas's differences with the national Democratic Party under President James Buchanan's leadership. The acrimonious division among Illinois' Democrats between Douglasites and Buchanan's followers in 1858 prefigured a wider struggle throughout the northern Democratic Party during the two following years, a struggle which, to some of his party rivals' surprise, Douglas won by a huge margin. Because both men achieved their parties' presidential candidacy in 1860, it is easy to accept the force of Don E. Fehrenbacher's conclusion: “The Lincoln–Douglas campaign of 1858 proved to be a contest without a real loser…. The momentum gathered in their contest for a Senate seat carried both Lincoln and Douglas to the threshold of the White House, but only one could enter.” What is less obvious is how Illinois' electorate responded to the rhetoric so plentifully presented to them and how far the debate over sectional issues subsumed all other political questions in 1858.

Classic works of fiction almost always raise “penetrating questions about the foundations and effects of the political regime, i.e. human nature and its implications for society.” But popular fiction, too, can be an instrument of social and political understanding. As Gore Vidal has argued:

Writers of fiction, even more than systematic philosophers, tend to reveal unconscious presuppositions. One might even say that those writers who are the most popular are the ones who share the largest number of common assumptions with their audience, subliminally reflecting prejudices and aspirations so obvious that they are never stated and, never stated, never precisely understood or even recognized. John O'Hara is an excellent example of this kind of writer.

We all know that the revolution in art – or the revolutions in the arts – that resulted in the emergence of what we loosely call “modernism” created a great deal of excitement and controversy. Noise and shouting filled the air. Critics opposed to the new currents saw in them the possibility of the destruction of everything noble in the Western tradition of the arts and perhaps even Western civilization itself. Defenders of the new ways were only slightly less acrimonious, if at all, and between the two there were continuing tumultuous and occasionally bitter arguments.

Sinclair Lewis's critical reputation could not easily be lower than it is at present. In the discussion that follows I want to suggest that a radical re-evaluation of this reputation, and of Lewis's achievement as a novelist, is necessary; not just because he ought to be read and studied seriously in his own right, but also because in his best fiction he addresses very important issues of narrative technique and of historical and structural analysis. And I believe that without a proper understanding of Lewis's engagement with his material in these areas, most notably in Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922), the two texts I want to concentrate on here, any account of the re-shaping of American fiction in the years after the First World War must be seriously incomplete.

Lewis has proved to be an extremely easy writer to dismiss from any literary or intellectual canon, and not without good reason. His fictions are direct, accessible, and for the most part actively simple. Like Wells and Bennett in England he is a provincial writer of materialist romances, apparently left behind by Modernism; like Upton Sinclair he is a clumsy and over-productive fictionaliser of obvious social problems; in the 1920s he is a man of middle age writing stories about middle-aged characters for a middle-aged readership in a literary and intellectual climate obsessed and characterized by youth; he is a “wildly inconsistent writer, who in his weakest work unquestionably justifies Schorer's description of him as “one of the worst writers in modern American Literature.” And probably more than any other twentieth-century writer of comparable stature, Lewis has been a victim of literary history-writing. With only the very weak platform of spectacular popular success to support him, he stands as the clearest (and unfortunately also the most vociferous) representative of the American fiction that Hemingway and Fitzgerald and their apologists were careful to be seen to be superseding in the 1920s and 1930s.

Writing in her autobiography about Southern fiction at the turn of the century, Ellen Glasgow argued that it needed more violence and toughness to counteract its tendency towards “insidious” sentimentality; as she defined it later, such literature could be redeemed only by “Blood and irony.” Nearly fifty years later, she might have been gratified to see how a fellow Southern woman writer had answered this need. Violence and irony are endemic in O'Connor's short stories, which depict brutality, physical abuse, murder, and betrayal perpetrated by characters who are often termed “grotesques” –physical freaks, idiots, and maniacs. But they owe their striking impact not only to the violence which they embody in terms of character and event, but also to the violence which they enact on the reader. They implement a shock technique, dependent not so much on the nature of the fictional material, whose horrorsare objectified by a skilfully controlled comic/ironic tone, as on exploitation of the reader's preconceptions.The disjunctions of the stories, which "work," in O'Connor's words, by portraying "an action that is totally unexpected,"are reproduced in the reader's subjection to an abrupt shattering of expectation, producing a profound sense of unease or bewilderment. Thus the most exceptional and original aspect of the violence in O'Connor's fiction is found in its manipulative relationship with the audience who,as one critic has expressed it, may feel "cheated,"4 not to say victimized,by the author's mocking tyranny.

Social scientists collected many, many American Indian autobiographies during the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s, autobiographies of Apaches, Navajos, Hopis, Zunis, Papagos, Kiowas, Sioux, a Kwakiutl, autobiographies of shamans, shepherds, hunters, farmers, men, and women. Many of these are now moldering in the dark reaches of forgotten file cabinets, but a remarkable number were published, and for this we must be grateful. These narratives are to us a legacy, affording us some sense of what it means to see the world and the self according to ancient habits of mind.