Denis Donoghue is one of that small company of transatlantic men of letters who have established reputations as distinguished critics of both English and American literature. An Irishman by birth, Donoghue has taught at University College, Dublin, at Cambridge University, and (currently) at New York University, where he occupies the Henry James Chair of Letters, and since 1959 has published a dozen volumes, including studies of Yeats, Swift, Emily Dickinson, modern verse drama, modern American poetry, and “the poetic imagination”; he is professionally concerned with the subject of Irishness (his last book, a selection of essays on his native land and literature, was entitled We Irish), and his new collection, Reading America[1]—a gathering of twenty-seven reviews and essays about American writers from Emerson to Ashbery—testifies to his equally serious interest in the question of just what it is that makes American literature American.

This question is most explicitly engaged in the book’s opening essay, “America in Theory,” in which Donoghue discusses some of the more familiar critical conceptions of the nature of “the American experience” as it is rendered in the national literature. Examining the writings of such diverse critics as Tocqueville, D. H. Lawrence, Henry James, V. L. Parrington, Perry Miller, F. O. Matthiessen, W. H. Auden, Richard Chase, Leslie Fiedler, Leo Marx, Alfred Kazin, and Harold Bloom (Donoghue is nothing if not a compulsive scholar), he attempts to formulate a sort of unified field theory of American literature. But he never settles down