To the Editors:
I hope you will allow me to respond to James W. Tuttleton’s remarks (in “Rewriting the History of American Literature,” November, 1986) on my two collections of essays and on the projected multi-volume Cambridge History of American Literature. I take this opportunity to clarify certain important points which, to judge by the review, I failed to make plain.

First, Professor Tuttleton assumes that I do not share his belief in the true, the good, and the beautiful. I do. The problem is that literary historians have become aware that texts and other artifacts in which the true, the good, and the beautiful make themselves manifest are susceptible to controversy and bias, subject to the contradictions of language and the mind, and invested to varying degrees with the particular political, artistic, and intellectual processes of the societies in which they were produced. There is nothing new in this. Nor is this an expression of political radicalism, aesthetic reductionism, or moral relativism. It is simply historical awareness; and an awareness heightened in this case by the special circumstances in which American literary studies developed, including the controversy and bias that attended the reception of what we have come to call our national classics, from Moby-Dick and Leaves of Grass through Huckleberry Finn. I should probably mention Washington Irving’s writings as well, since Mr. Tuttleton’s scholarship so clearly shows the value of the work of recovery and reassessment.

In this light, let me try to reassure