Recovering American Literature

In six lively essays, published previously in the Partisan Review and elsewhere, Shaw, a New York City-based critic, argues for the rescue of canonical American novels from the influence of politically correct university ideologues. Each chapter compares past and present trends in literary criticism in the appraisal of a major 19th-century novel; the novelists include Nathaniel Hawthorne ( The Scarlet Letter ), Mark Twain ( Huckleberry Finn ), Henry James ( The Bostonians ) and Herman Melville ( Moby Dick , Billy Budd , Typee ). Shaw posits that while earlier critics dealt primarily with these books as substantive and meaningful works of literature, critics since the 1960s, using evaluative interpretation, have reduced them to reflections of their own various political agendas. Among his examples of contemporary critical approaches are the reckoning of Hawthorne's character Hester Prynne as a feminist (Shaw particularly indicts feminist critics) and the alleged distortion of Melville's Billy Budd into an argument against the power of the state. Shaw's point of view is somewhat controversial but debate is necessary to the development of all thoughtful alternatives to some of the current theoretical trends. (May)