When at twenty-three Carson McCullers came to fame in 1940 with The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, her first readers thought they knew very well what to make of her. With Erskine Caldwell (and with a completely misread William Faulkner), she was described as a member of the Southern Gothic school, a purgatorial figment of the Northern imagination to which Flannery O’Connor was also consigned. Of her second novel, Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), Time magazine said, with characteristic fatuity, that it “is the Southern school at its most Gothic, but also at its best. It is as though William Faulkner saw to the bottom of matters which merely excite him, shed his stylistic faults, and wrote it all out with Tolstoyan lucidity.” By the time of Clock Without Hands (1961), her fame had faded considerably, and now few critics put her in the first rank even of Southern writers of her own generation. She did have considerable influence, however; Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1945), in its sense of emotional thwartedness and its concern with the overpowering misery and hidden obsessions of its characters, owes a great deal to McCullers, as does the brooding lyricism and pungent sexual strangeness of Truman Capote’s first novel Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948). (Indeed, Idabell Thompkins in the latter novel could be the blood sister of Mick Kelly in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.)

Around the turn of the century, the German school was still at the forefront, its two leading figures being Julius Klengel and Hugo Becker, both representatives of the Dresden school in a direct line from Grützmacher. Despite their shared inheritance of the need for serious interpretation and rejection of the over-Romantic virtuoso style, they were totally different in their concepts of teaching; Klengel's approach was empirical, whereas Becker concentrated more on scientific aspects.

Klengel was born in Leipzig into a family of professional musicians; his first lessons were with Emil Hegar, principal cellist of the Gewandhaus Orchestra. From early childhood he played chamber music with his siblings, and at fifteen joined the Gewandhaus orchestra, succeeding his teacher as principal cellist at the age of twenty-two; the same year he was appointed ‘Royal Professor’ at the Leipzig Conservatoire. Klengel also appeared as a soloist in Germany and in Russia, where he gave the first performance in that country of Haydn's D major Concerto (1887); but he will go down in history for his remarkable teaching gifts. Paul Grümmer, Emanuel Feuermann, Guilhermina Suggia, Edmund Kurtz and William Pleeth are among his most famous pupils. Klengel never encouraged his students to copy, but always helped them to find their own way of playing; thus they were all individual in their approach. Klengel was also a composer who wrote imaginatively for the cello: his works include several concertos and a Hymn for Twelve Cellos, dedicated to the memory of the conductor Arthur Nikisch.

INTRODUCTION

Ancient Greek philosophy arose in a culture whose world had always teemed with divinities. “Everything is full of gods, ”said Thales (Aristotle De an. 1.5, 411a8), and the earliest “theories of everything” were mythological panoramas such as Hesiod's Theogony, in which the genealogy of the gods is also a story about the evolution of the universe. Hence when certain Greeks began to think about the physical world in a philosophical way, they were concerning themselves with matters which it was still quite natural to term “divine, ” even in the context of their new scientific approach. Because of this, it is not entirely obvious where one should draw the line between the theology of the early Greek philosophers and their other achievements. But clarity is not served by classifying as “theological” every statement or view of theirs that features concepts of divinity. To theologize is not simply to theorize using such concepts in a non-incidental way. Rather, it is, for instance, to reflect upon the divine nature, or to rest an argument or explanation on the idea of divinity as such, or to discuss the question of the existence of gods, and to speculate on the grounds or causes of theistic belief.

Despite the emergence of writers who were moving in new directions, the late 1940s was hardly a stellar period in American fiction. Very few major novels were produced. Most of the important books, as we have already seen, either dealt with the war or reflected its aftermath, since very few events altered American life as much as this global conflict. Many novels that were much acclaimed at the time, such as The Naked and the Dead, All the King’s Men, The Young Lions, Guard of Honor, and Other Voices, Other Rooms, seem flawed or dated today; in some cases their authors (Mailer, Capote) went on to make their mark in strikingly different styles. The plays of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller and the hard-boiled films noirs of the era seem stronger today than the fiction of the period. The work of some novelists who were just beginning to write then, including Mailer, James Jones, Saul Bellow, Flannery O’Connor, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, still feels vital and impressive today, yet their work belongs primarily to the literary scene of the next decade.

Nevertheless, the forties were the testing ground for everything that happened in American writing for the next twenty years. As the American economy moved from Depression and war production to affluence, consumerism, and worldwide geopolitical dominance, writers turned away from economic and social concerns to engage more with spiritual and personal issues. The radical politics and progressive social views that were so important between the wars lost favor, despite Harry S. Truman’s unexpected victory over Thomas E. Dewey in 1948.

This multivolume history marks a new beginning in the study of American literature. The first Cambridge History of American Literature (1917) helped introduce a new branch of English writing. The Literary History of the United States, assembled thirty years later under the aegis of Robert E. Spiller, helped establish a new field of academic study. This History embodies the work of a generation of Americanists who have redrawn the boundaries of the field. Trained mainly in the 1960s and early 1970s, representing the broad spectrum of both new and established directions in all branches of American writing, these scholars and critics have shaped, and continue to shape, what has become a major area of modern literary scholarship.

Over the past three decades, Americanist literary criticism has expanded from a border province into a center of humanist studies. The vitality of the field is reflected in the rising interest in American literature nationally and globally, in the scope of scholarly activity, and in the polemical intensity of debate. Significantly, American texts have come to provide a major focus for inter- and cross-disciplinary investigation. Gender studies, ethnic studies, and popular-culture studies, among others, have penetrated to all corners of the profession, but perhaps their single largest base is American literature. The same is true with regard to controversies over multiculturalism and canon formation: the issues are transhistorical and transcultural, but the debates themselves have often turned on American books.

Walker Percy’s novels are the artistic play of a disciplined intellectual with wide spread scientific and philosophical knowlege. A friend from youth of the novelist and historian Shelby Foote, Percy was raised largely in the family of his uncle, William Alexander Percy, whose Lanterns on the Levee: Memoirs of a Planter’s Son (1941) captures the intellectual life of a genteel, romantic, public-minded, scholarly, culturally conservative white Southerner, an outspoken opponent of the Ku Klux Klan and of racist violence (but not of racial segregation) such as Faulkner had portrayed in Gavin Stevens. Percy remembered his “Uncle Will” with affection, but he was also acutely aware of the limitations of the cast of mind his uncle represented and could not bring himself to rely on the mixture of secular traditionalism and fatalism (held in check by noblesse oblige) his uncle lived by.

Percy’s original interests were scientific and medical, leading him to study chemistry at the University of North Carolina and to earn his medical degree from Columbia University in 1941. He also had, during this period, a deep intellectual investment in psychoanalysis, undergoing three years of analysis while in medical school. All of this changed when, during his residency as a pathologist at Bellevue Hospital, he contracted tuberculosis from an autopsy patient, and, quarantined for an extended period, began a serious course of philosophical and religious study. The ultimate fruits of this study were his return to the South (he lived in Covington, Louisiana, for most of his life), and his conversion to Roman Cathlicism.

Another shift in the study of emergent American literatures that seems inevitable is a closer affiliation between the fields of ethnic literature and gay and lesbian literature, between minority discourse theory and queer theory. Understanding the ways in which the dynamics of emergence both change and do not change when the literature in question orients itself around sexuality rather than ethnicity is a conceptual task that is pressing in both of these fields.

Gay writing has, of course, been around since at least the time of Socrates and Sappho, but the idea of a self-constituted field called “gay and lesbian literature” did not exist before the era of gay liberation that began in 1969 and could not have existed before the latter part of the nineteenth century. The labels gay, lesbian, and homosexual take for granted a relatively recent idea: namely, the idea of sexual orientation, according to which same-sex erotic attraction, if present, constitutes an abiding and defining characteristic of personal identity. Indeed, it is thought that the term homosexuality did not exist before 1869, when it appeared in a pamphlet written by Karl Maria Kertbeny entitled “An Open Letter to the Prussian Minister of Justice.” Classical Greek has no word for “homosexual” because ancient Greek culture understood sexuality as a matter of preference rather than orientation, liable to change from occasion to occasion – at least as far as men were concerned. Describing the sexual practices of ancient Greece in The Use of Pleasure (1985), Michel Foucault argues that “the notion of homosexuality is plainly inadequate as a means of referring to an experience, forms of valuation, and a system of categorization so different from ours. The Greeks did not see love for one’s own sex and love for the other sex as opposites, as two exclusive choices, two radically different types of behavior.”

Flannery O’Connor’s passionate religious convictions were the central fact of her intellectual and aesthetic life, vastly outweighing in her view any of the ways her sensibility was shaped by her gender, her region, or her race. Although like the Agrarians of the preceding generation O’Connor saw the South as if not resisting the rush to an alienating, secular, and capitalist modernity, at least as not yet totally given over to it, she never sentimentalized the vocation of the subsistence farmer and did not have romantic ideas about traditionalism generally. She was as bitterly critical of the urban habit of life and of secular culture as the Agrarians were, and those characters who represented for her a modern, cosmopolitan, secular, Northern-oriented consciousness, such characters as Rayber of The Violent Bear It Away, Asbury Fox of “The Enduring Chill,” Julian of “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” or Hulga Hopewell of “Good Country People,” were subjected to a ruthless satire.

To say that religious issues mattered more to O’Connor than political ones did is not to say that O’Connor was blind to the political and cultural transformation of the South of her day, or that she had nothing to say about the integration struggle that was proceeding throughout the years of her career, although she never wrote about it as Warren did in Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South and Who Speaks for the Negro? or as Welty did in “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge” is set during the period immediately after the integration of buses, and contrasts, with irony in both directions, the attitudes toward race of the progressive Julian and his racist mother.

Some of Hardy's most striking dicta seem designed to make it difficult to speak of his aesthetics - seem, indeed, to embody a dogged or defiant anti-aestheticism. For, while some of his finest work, including two of his greatest novels and his first volume of verse, appeared in the 1890s, he was decidedly not of the nineties; and while he would never have come out in favor of “art for my sake” as aggressively as D. H. Lawrence, he would surely have given this stance his quietly firm endorsement. “The beauty of association,”he declares in a notebook entry dated 28 September 1877 and quoted in his autobiography, “is entirely superior to the beauty of aspect, and a beloved relative's old battered tankard to the finest Greek vase” (LW, p. 124). Such a statement implies aesthetic judgments based on criteria that are subjective, even secret, rather than those shared by any school, movement, period, or culture: as so often with Hardy, solipsism is not far away.

A consideration of the influence of contemporary religion, science, and philosophy on Hardy's writings requires some prefatory cautions. First, such influences often overlap, and identification of how they affected Hardy's work must sometimes be no more than a tentative pointing to diverse and complex sets of possible sources whose precise influence cannot be determined. Thus in Far from the Madding Crowd Gabriel Oak intervenes to protect Bathsheba's ricks from fire and storm, uses his knowledge to save her sheep, and in other ways acts consistently with the biblical teaching that man was given the responsibility of exercising dominion over nature. At the same time, Oak's conduct is congruent with Thomas Henry Huxley's argument in Man's Place in Nature that it is mankind's ethical responsibility to control a morally indifferent environment. However, Oak's actions are even more remarkably consistent with details of the philosophical analysis of man's moral relationship to the natural world in John Stuart Mill's essay “Nature” - though its date of publication makes that influence only barely possible. In this and many other such cases, questions of which, and to what degree, one or more possible sources - “religious,” “scientific,” or “philosophical”- might have affected what Hardy wrote cannot be resolved with any certainty.

From their first publication, the works of Thomas Hardy have been explicitly and obsessively associated with matters of gender. This is the case, not only because these texts confront and perpetuate ideas about sexual difference that were influential in Hardy's own time, but also because his vivid, contradictory, and often strange representations of sexual desire, like a series of cultural Rorschach tests, have continually elicited from his readers intense and revealing responses: the act of interpretation exposes unspoken assumptions that circulate in the historical moment of the interpreter, and Hardy's representations of sexuality are especially effective in making visible those particularized hermeneutical processes. Indeed, to study the changing responses to gender in Hardy's published works from 1871 to the present is, in effect, to trace a fairly detailed history of the ways in which sexuality has been constructed within the British Isles and North America since the late-Victorian period. This essay will offer, therefore, only a schematic summary of what, in my own historical moment, I consider to be the most significant responses to representations of sexual difference in Hardy's texts.

Essay titles are an attempt to say much in little, at once synoptic shorthand for the work which follows and for the whole area of intellectual enquiry to which it alludes. As such, they are susceptible to ambiguity and imprecision, and the title of the present essay is no exception. What is meant, we might ask, by “Critical Theory,”and is it synonymous with that other cognate phrase - “Literary Theory”? While the commonly made slippage between the terms demands urgent attention, it is way beyond the scope of an essay such as this. Let me clear the ground, therefore, by simply stating that I take “Literary Theory” primarily to be concerned with offering theoretical definitions of the nature of literature, and “Critical Theory” to be the articulation of theorized principles on which critical approaches to the analysis of literature are premised. The latter, at least, will be the working definition deployed in this essay. But even so, in its present formulation, the title remains ambiguous.

Central to all of the novels under discussion here is a story of love, courtship, and marriage. More particularly, for the central female character in each case, this central fable takes the form of an erotic or marital “double choice,” to use Franco Moretti's phrase; the woman is first attracted to the “right” partner, then distracted by one or more “wrong”partners before confirming - whether emotionally or formally - the “rightness”of the original choice. Also central to all three, though, is a perhaps less familiar story of class mobility and social allegiance, focused through the narrative structures of fluctuating economic fortunes, ownership of property, the accumulation of financial or social capital, trading, and inheritance. These two central points of concern are, of course, deeply interconnected, thematically and in narrative terms. The triangulated relationships of potential lovers represent marital choice as the primary mode of class transition for women; it is evident that, though Fancy, Bathsheba, and Grace have all received a good education, in each case it functions rather as a marital asset than as an alternative path for class mobility.

In the Victorian period, poetry was still the high genre of literature. Speaking of his early twenties, Hardy said: “A sense of the truth of poetry, of its supreme place in literature, had awakened itself in me” (LW, p. 415). “Poetry,” he said in 1912, “is the heart of literature” (PW, p. 246). As Hardy (born in 1840) began to write in the 1860s, the era of Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold was slowly changing into the era of Swinburne, Hopkins, and Hardy. This formulation would surprise contemporary Victorians, since Hopkins and Hardy's poetries were not well known until the twentieth century. Even in the twentieth century, while Hopkins became celebrated by the new critics, Hardy remained a controversial case as a poet, partly because of his fame as a novelist, partly because of certain characteristics of his verse that were less amenable than Hopkins's to the analytic methods of the new criticism. Yet now Hardy is seen as a primary source in the founding of a major stream of modern English poetry, as charted for example by Donald Davie. Only in the last half of the twentieth century has Hardy's major stature as a poet come to be assumed.

Although Hardy was, so remarkably, a twentieth-century poet as well as a nineteenth-century novelist, the date of his birth is now nearly one hundred and sixty years distant, the date of his death already seventy. His immense fame in his own lifetime aroused an inquisitiveness as to his personal life that he sought strenuously to resist, and since his death his continuing, even increasing, reputation and popularity have naturally attracted the attention of biographers. Notoriously, however, Hardy's concern for privacy extended beyond his own death, encompassed the destruction of most of his personal papers and the composition of his own posthumously published official “life,”and was endorsed (even though they agreed on little else) by his literary executors.

In these circumstances, and at this distance in time, it seems appropriate to stand back a little from the narrative preoccupations of biography proper and attempt some examination of the sources currently available for the study of Hardy’s life and career. Of particular importance are those documentary materials (notebooks, letters, manuscripts) already in print or on microfilm, their wide accessibility enabling students and readers everywhere to approach Hardy directly and establish a “personal” relationship independent of - though not necessarily uninformed by - the published biographies. Such firsthand experiences can be enriching in themselves, and the starting-points of individual scholarship. They can also serve as touchstones by which to assess the tone, temper, and interpretive biases of different biographers and interrogate not only the adequacy and accuracy of their evidence but also the specificity, or absence of specificity, with which the sources of that evidence are identified. At the very least, they sharpen awareness of just how “knowable” a figure Hardy is now or ever can be.

Jude the Obscure is an account of the doomed existence of the protagonist named in the title, from the moment he is first inspired by a rural schoolmaster to think of a university education as the highest possible attainment, to his dying alone, while hearing celebratory shouts and organ notes in the distance from Remembrance Day at Christminster University, a place which has given not the slightest heed to his ambitions. Between these two moments are twenty years of self-directed study, and defeats in sex and love inflicted on him by two women, one sensual and pragmatic, the other intellectual and intensely seeking.

The intellectual woman, Sue Bridehead, is Jude's cousin. In effect she is the novel's co-protagonist although not named in the title; she is arguably Hardy's most challenging character to understand. Jude's mother and Sue's father were siblings, and had experienced disastrous marriages, the basis for one of the novel's minor themes, that some people are poor candidates for marriage. On top of what is taken to be a family curse is the reprehensible and constricting nature of marriage itself as Jude and Sue perceive it. The times and their own personalities conspire to thwart their best intentions and hopes. Well-meaning, intermittently sensitive to the other’s needs while usually insistent upon the inherent justice of his and her own needs, the couple interact with a rawness of ego that includes lacerating self-condemnation. The novel’s characterizing tone is bitterness, seemingly unmediated because the narrator shares the characters' sense of outrage that society censures both their unconventional sexual relations and their idealism.

Hardy among the modernists

As with literary Romanticisms, a variety of literary modernisms can be described, and no description of modernism as a singular, determinate movement will gain universal assent. Among the varieties of poetic modernism, Thomas Hardy's is distinctive because of its class-inflected, skeptical, self-implicating tendencies. The modernity of Hardy's poetry reveals itself in highly ambiguous language, in a resistance to conventional attitudes and hierarchies involving nature and society, in the transforming of lyric traditions, and in an insistence by means of negativity on the possibility of achieving a defiant, permanently revolutionary freedom to choose and to refuse. It is worth admitting at the outset, however, that any depiction of Hardy's modernism is of necessity a selective affair. There is evidence of Hardy's modernity in poems that span the entire period of his career as a publishing poet from 1898 through 1928. Considering that Hardy's collected poetry consists of more than nine hundred texts, not including The Dynasts, a variety of patterns and tendencies can be identified. Primary to my reading of his modernity are poems that reflect on nature and on Romantic attitudes, war poetry, elegies, and poems that use negative language prominently.