Personality and Cultural History in the Novel: Two American Examples

Abstract

IN a critical review of contemporary directions in the study of American cultural history, David Davis has pointed out that the American Studies movement has characteristically produced works that expose a contradiction or cluster of tensions embedded within the culture itself as the result of an interplay between past choices and commitments and new ideas or situations. Many of these literary studies have been alert to the way in which symbols and myths have concealed or accommodated conflicts in belief and value: the myths of the West or of the American Adam; the pastoral ideal of the middle landscape between primitive nature and urban civilization; the image of Europe as the Old World; and the contrary types of Cavalier and Yankee as stand-ins for the American character. But