Richard Mather's promising pastoral career in England suddenly ended in 1634 with the wholesale suspensions inaugurated by Archbishop Laud. With no choice other than submission to the Church of England, Mather set sail for New England and, in so doing, joined a large scale folk migration that was to total over 15,000 people in the decade between 1630 and 1640. Encouraged by the early successes of the ‘ Great Migration ’ to New England, Mather took the birth of his son in 1639 as a sign and named him Increase ‘ on the Account of the great Increase of every sort, which God favoured the country with about the time of his nativity ’. A year after Increase's birth, Richard Mather's joy was once again chastened when there ensued a remigration to England such that, in Increase Mather's words, ‘ since the year 1640, more Persons have removed out of New England, than have gone thither ’. Leading in the removal from New England were nearly half of the highly trained ministers and university men who, in large measure, accounted for the uniqueness of the New England settlements.

The good things about America, Santayana wrote to Van Wyck Brooks, ‘ are football, kindness, and jazz bands ’. To many this remark would typify the philosopher's lifelong disdain of American life. But Santayana meant his description as a compliment. For he saw football and jazz as manifestations of a healthy spontaneity and goodwill. Of course, there is no question about his ambivalence towards the United States; he loathed what he took to be a lethal presence in the American psyche – a prosaic utilitarianism and moral poverty. Yet he could not write off those qualities that in part redeemed the brave new world: ‘ There is much forgetfulness, much callow disrespect for what is past or alien; but there is a fund of vigour, goodness, and hope such as no nation ever possessed before.’

The problem of defining a coherent cultural identity is one that has confronted generations of Afro-Americans. As part of the justification and defence of slavery and the slave trade many whites rationalized their actions by arguing that all Africans were cultureless savages. The same combination of guilt and arrogance induced them to attempt to suppress and denigrate surviving elements of a culture whose very existence they had already denied. Most black Americans responded to these pressures by rejecting Africa and their African heritage as a source of shame and by trying to deny and to erase their blackness. Malcom X clearly understood this when he proclaimed in 1965: ‘ We have been a people who hated our African characteristics. We hated our black heads, we hated the shape of our noses …, we hated the color of our skin.’ Identification with the dominant white culture took many forms. For some Blacks it involved the use of hair straightening and skin bleaching; for others it meant the elimination of any ethnic quality in their speech, dress, cuisine and religion; for many more it meant a life of morality and hard work lived according to the dictates of the Puritan ethic. The loss of any distinctive cultural identity involved in this process was made worse by the unwillingness of white society to recognize and accept the Afro-American as part of the dominant culture. In these circumstances many blacks found themselves in a cultural limbo without an adequate self-image. White domination of the media meant that they sometimes felt literally invisible. James Baldwin drew attention to this dilemma in a speech delivered in June 1963, when he noted that:

A black child born in this country … discovers two terrifying things. First of all he discovers that he does not exits in it, no matter where he looks – by which I mean books, magazines, movies – there is no reflection of himself anywhere … [if] he finds anything which looks like him, he is authoritatively assured that this is a savage, or a comedian who has never contributed anything to civilization.

Belief that the Supreme Court is overburdened is not new. In the years after the Civil War, the expansion of the United States, both territorially and economically, enlarged the work of the Justices enormously, for not only did the number of cases on which they were required to pass judgement increase but the miles they had to travel within their own circuits also multiplied hugely. In 1891 the Circuit Courts of Appeal Act was passed, establishing intermediate courts between the District Courts, product of the original 1789 Judiciary Act, and the Supreme Court itself. Whereas in 1890 before the Act was passed 623 new cases were filed, in the 1892 Term only 275 were, and the Court was soon able to reduce its backlog. Nevertheless the number began once again to drift upwards so that by 1923 nearly 750 appeals and petitions for certiorari, on most of which the Justices were obliged to pronounce, reached the Supreme Court. Following intense lobbying by Howard Taft, at that time Chief Justice, a major reform took place in 1925 which allowed the Court discretionary power over virtually all its docket.

Henry James's The Ivory Tower (1917) has suffered a similar fate to that of other incomplete last novels; most critical discussion has centred on the way it would have ended, taking into account resemblances with earlier works. This line of enquiry has not been very profitable; James's late style is too complex and rich to tempt anyone to continue The Ivory Tower in the way that ‘ Another Lady ’ has recently gone on with Sanditon. In any case one cannot legitimately say one wishes that James had lived to finish The Ivory Tower, since in fact he lived on without doing so; he had enough time to complete it if he had wanted. His general intentions were clear as we know from the ample notes he left. Why then did James give up? He stopped with the outbreak of the First World War, no doubt on the day war broke out. The really interesting critical question with regard to The Ivory Tower is: What is there in the novel, in its design as well as in its completed opening, which James found contradicted by war? James's imagination found the creative act of writing The Ivory Tower incompatible with war-time experience. He turned to other work, such as The Sense of the Past.

In this paper I want to engage in a speculative manner with a number of issues, both moral and stylistic, that reverberate around the contemporary novel. I have chosen to focus this discussion on the idea of the mad hero because, in the concepts of madness and the heroic, vital elements in contemporary aesthetics coincide.