By 1700, European empires had fully annexed the American continents; by midcentury, a debate over the value of the new acquisition divided the literature of exploration. In that debate, one side offered a “degenerationist” argument to the effect that nature in the New World wilderness had fallen from its proper level, which could only be maintained by cultivation. The other side countered that American nature had been remarkably fertile from pre-Columbian days and that cultivation was only bringing out, not creating, its inherent fertility. Both sides concurred on the necessity of colonizing the New World, of course. But the degenerationists understood colonizing as opening new territories for annexation to the existing European world; the defenders of American nature saw the newly annexed continents as constituting their own world, which might even surpass Europe. The degenerationists were largely Europeans; most of the defenders, already Americans.

The lines drawn in “the dispute of the New World, ” as this controversy is commonly known, extend to map the world of eighteenth-century political and scientific thought as a whole. In the arguments over the worth of New World flora and fauna, it is possible to trace the emergence not only of ideas of America but reciprocally of revised images of Europe as well. Reciprocity is the key term here. It was the central dynamic in a dispute that enacted the culminating moment of the discovery, when the New World fully entered into the worldview of the Old. The early colonial expeditions can be understood incrementally. There was more to the world than had been known; but because the additional portions were accruing to Europe, the enlarged world retained its prior order. Geopolitically at least, the center still held. But the extraordinary vigor of the eighteenth-century dispute concerning the agricultural potential and general desirability of the New World indicates that seismic forces were at play.

Religious voices speak first in the Revolution. At one level, this primacy merely restates the dominance of religious expression in early American culture. Until 1765, religious publications in the colonies outnumber all other intellectual writings combined, and they remain the single largest category of publication throughout the revolutionary era. But initial dominance only begins to explain the importance of religious expression in Anglo–American political debate. The relation between dissenting religious traditions and the growth of oppositional political discourse is a barometer of cultural modification and literary creativity throughout the era.

Steeped in the English revolutions of the seventeenth century, radical Protestants in eighteenth-century America know how to oppose a king. Jonathan Mayhew's approval of “the Resistance made to King Charles I” in A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission (1750) is shocking to his contemporaries not because it “takes the side of Liberty, the BIBLE, and Common Sense, in opposition to Tyranny, PRIESTCRAFT, and Nonsense” – standard dichotomies in eighteenth-century Protestant thought – but because, in rejecting ‘the slavish doctrine of passive obedience and nonresistance,’ it also advocates the right to judge and then act against a king as part of “the natural and legal rights of the people against the unnatural and illegal encroachments of arbitrary power.’

Similar language could be heard in England, but it dominates debate in America in a different way altogether. Mayhew, after all, first preaches Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission before his own congregation in the prestigious West Church of Boston. He and other American clergymen can take greater risks than their English counterparts when accused of “preaching politics instead of CHRIST” because they face a large and uniquely sympathetic audience for radical Protestant polemics.

Beginning in the 1650s, the growing number of merchants in Boston, Salem, Cambridge, New-town, and other large towns along the seaboard began to discover themselves to be a special class. Unlike farmers, who were threatened by new immigrants seeking land, the merchants favored the growth and development of new products and international trade. During the Half-Way Covenant controversy of the 1660s, powerful merchants such as John Hull embraced those Pauline aspects of Puritan doctrines that had originally favored expansion of the fellowship, and they sided with those who supported more liberal membership standards. As disputes raged within First Church, Boston, in the 1660s, a coalition made up mainly of merchants split off to found Third Church, later known as the Old South. Under the leadership of Thomas Thatcher until 1678 and of Samuel Willard from then until his death in 1707, the Old South maintained quite lenient membership requirements.

One critical text confronting the issue of church membership was Giles Firmin's The Real Christian (1670). A prolific contributor to the parliamentary debates under Cromwell, Firmin lived in New England in the 1630s and 1640s and then returned to England during the Protectorate. Firmin had criticized his former New England colleagues Thomas Hooker and Thomas Shepard for being too rigid in their schematic accounts of preparation and for their discouragingly high standards for proving conversion. Firmin tried to persuade his English colleagues to advocate more tolerance, to understand “self-love” as natural, and to recognize God to be merciful and reasonable. His work found wide circulation in Boston in the 1670s, and its republication in Boston in 1742 demonstrates that the debates over conversion and church membership still continued seventy years later.

Washington Irving has as good a claim as anyone to the title “Father of American Literature.” Born in 1783, the year the United States won its freedom, and named for the military hero venerated as the Father of His Country, Irving was the first American to make a successful vocation of authorship. Although contemporaries both at home and abroad recognized his seminal importance as the man who declared the nation's literary independence, later readers have dealt less kindly with Irving. Most have ignored his claims to precedence and dismissed him as inherently less interesting and “modern” than either James Fenimore Cooper, who followed him historically, or Charles Brockden Brown, who never attracted a popular readership. “Father of American Literature,” in this sense, implies that Irving belonged to an outdated phase of culture – archaic and pre-Romantic, too remote to engage twentieth-century sensibilities.

Much in Irving's career and work lends support to this view. He portrayed himself as an antiquated gentleman and idler who felt out of place in the bustling present and had no interest in the commercial side of letters. Avoiding the novel, the genre of a modernizing civilization, he worked in forms – the essay serial, the sketch, the history – that now seem old-fashioned or somehow inappropriate for a creative artist. His writing remained imprinted with the “residual” features of eighteenth-century culture: anonymity, collaboration, regard for factuality coupled with uneasiness about originality, and an understanding of literature as communal possession.

Toward the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, during the period when the English colonies declared themselves a nation, the enterprise of coming to the New World and exploring it changed decisively. From a perilous journey into the unknown, it became the civilized pursuit of traveling in America. In 1796, Timothy Dwight (1764–1846), finding the life of a president of Yale College too sedentary, decided “to devote [his] vacations … to a regular course of traveling”. During the second of these salubrious journeys, it occurred to him while surveying the orderly countryside to wonder how these New England landscapes had appeared eighty or even a hundred years earlier. But he found the past impossible to recall, so swift had been the transformation. He resolved instead to capture the fleeting present and record it for those who would live eighty or a hundred years hence. “A country changing as rapidly as New England must, if truly exhibited, be described in a manner resembling that in which a painter would depict a cloud”, he wrote. It was an accurate rendition of a period of transition. Dwight traveled for his health and wrote about his travels as a literary pursuit – reflectively, speculatively, poetically, and for an undoubted posterity.

The grandson of Jonathan Edwards and himself a prominent minister, Dwight represents an already old New England. He recalls the persistence of Puritan values at the founding of the Republic. Commending the decent “competence” and measured way of life of his Connecticut neighbors, he disdains the excitements of the traditional travel narrative.

In 1826, at the opening ceremonies of New York's Bowery Theater, a speaker voiced the hope that “the latent talents of some native Bard may here be warmed into existence, who shall emulate the growing fame, acquired in other walks, by Irving and Cooper.” The statement reveals a conspicuous truth about the early American drama. As Western culture entered its Romantic phase, the American theater could not boast a single figure of international stature, a playwright who could stand comparison with the new Republic's leading fiction writers. The nearest America came to a world-famous dramatist in 1826 was John Howard Payne, a transplanted New Yorker whose adaptations of French hits played to full houses at London's Drury Lane; today, Payne is little more than a footnote to literary history.

The American drama was the most republican and propagandistic of the literary genres. Slow to accommodate the individualism that became synonymous with nineteenth-century authorship, it failed to develop Romantic talents of the highest rank. One might object that the nineteenth century, the age of the novel's apotheosis, proved remarkably inhospitable to Western playwriting generally. Although this may be an accurate appraisal, at least until the last quarter of the century, it remains true that the complex of assumptions governing the native stage was singularly uncongenial to the nurturing of Romantic inwardness and self-realization. The drama of the early Republic was intimately tied to the civic sphere. It retained a commitment to the common good long after fiction and poetry (or rather, the fictions and poems considered canonical) had modified or shed such loyalties for more private goals.

Michel Foucault wrote extensively about historical reconfigurations of knowledge in what would now be called the human sciences. During the 1970s, however, he argued (most notably in Discipline and Punish and the first volume of The History of Sexuality) that these reorganizations of knowledge also constituted new forms of power and domination. Foucault's works from this period have often generated contradictory responses from readers. His detailed historical remarks on the emergence of disciplinary and regulatory bio-power have been widely influential. Yet these detailed studies are connected to a more general conception of power, and of the epistemic and political positioning of the criticism of power, which many critics have found less satisfactory. Foucault's discussions of the relation between truth and power have similarly provoked concerns about their reflexive implications for his own analysis.

The principal purpose of this essay is to offer a sympathetic interpretation of the understanding of power and of knowledge that informs Foucault's historical studies of prisons and of the construction of a scientific discourse about sexuality. Since Foucault discussed power in this period rather more thematically than he did knowledge, my discussion of knowledge will build extensively upon his remarks about power. The essay will proceed in three parts. First I will briefly recapitulate Foucault's account of the intertwined emergence of new forms of power and knowledge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The second part will initiate my reflections upon the concepts of “power” and “knowledge” with a critical discussion of political and epistemic sovereignty.

The title of this chapter might seem paradoxical, even a contradiction in terms. The forbidding seriousness of Ibsen's later works has become a legend, especially to those who know them mainly by repute. Yet the earliest of his plays to deal with contemporary social realities were all classed as comedies; to understand how he developed as an artist - and as a social critic - it is essential to know something about the ways in which he approached and adapted the conventional comedy of his day.

It is as well to remember at the outset that the term 'comedy', even leaving aside its more specialized modern uses and more general older meanings, is an equivocal one. It has been used to denote a tone of voice or mode of perception (something 'light' or 'amusing'); it can indicate a special kind of dramatic plot, a 'happy end' with the blend of assurance and strain which that can imply; and it can suggest a specific subject-matter - in Jonson's words 'an image of the times' which deals 'with human follies not with crimes'. In much classic comedy - in Shakespeare or Molière or Holberg - all three of these senses may apply. But there is no logical reason why, in all circumstances, they should. The appalling may also be funny, without suggesting redemption or a happy end; human follies can also be crimes. One could read Ibsen's entire œuvre as a deconstruction of the various, always potentially divergent, elements of what is classed as comedy.

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. Our History embodies the work of a generation of Americanists who have redrawn the boundaries of the field and redefined the terms of its development. Trained 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 everywhere, nationally and internationally, and at every level – in high schools and colleges, in graduate programs, in publications, conferences, and public events. It is expressed in the sheer scope of scholarly activity and in the polemical intensity of debate. Virtually every recent school of criticism has found not just its followers here but many of its leading exponents. And increasingly over the past three decades, American texts have provided the 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 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 turned mainly on American books.

The people who already inhabited the North American continent had an old and richly developed oral literature; they did not write. To the diligent writers who proposed to colonize the New World the fact that its inhabitants had no system for writing was a definitive sign of their inferiority. In the eyes of the Europeans, the absence of indigenous writing among the Indians went far to vitiate their claim to the continent.

The first Native-American publication in North America, and until the nineteenth century almost the only one, was a sermon written and preached by Samson Occom (1723?–92) at the execution of a fellow Mohegan convicted of murder. Occom was a minister and worked with the educational mission of Eleazar Wheelock. The preface to the published Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, an Indian (1772), begins: ‘The world is already full of books.’ Why, Occom asks, add another, “since the most excellent writings of worthy and learned men are disregarded”? But he then reflects that these writings are “in a very high and refined language” beyond the comprehension of the common people. His “plain, everyday talk” is accessible to everyone; “little children may understand it; and poor Negroes may plainly and fully understand my meaning.” One last group will benefit from a simpler text: “my poor kindred the Indians.” There is a final reason for Occom to publish his “broken hints” and this has to do not with the sermon's readers but with its writer: “as it comes from an uncommon quarter, it may induce people to read it because it is from an Indian.”

Foucault's last attempt to situate his life's work in the Enlightenment tradition presumably laid to rest any lingering doubts about the rational basis of his work. Yet, Habermas and his sympathizers remained skeptical. The rational subject, they argued, was never adequately accounted for in Foucault's work.

Explanation for this discrepancy must be sought in Foucault's original disenchantment with the Enlightenment project – above all, his critique of modern humanism and the kind of subjectivity it entails. For the purposes of this essay, it will suffice to broach this topic by contrasting Foucault's critical method with the critique of ideology undertaken by members of the Frankfurt School (Part I). As we shall see, Foucault's critical method is more radical than theirs in that it brackets the emancipatory ideals underwriting reason itself. Stronger still, it allegedly shows the impossibility of the Hegelian categories of reflection in which these ideals are cast.

I shall argue that these categories are not as paradoxical as Foucault thinks. Indeed, I shall show that, mutatis mutandis, they inform the very hermeneutic circle in which he himself reformulated his understanding of the rational, self-empowering subject. The road leading to this conclusion must pass through the difficult terrain staked out by Habermas's theory of communicative action (Part II). The latter ostensibly redeems reason from its paradoxes while simultaneously demonstrating the self-referential contradictions attending its wholesale rejection.

Few events have captured the imaginations of Americans as powerfully as the Salem Village witchcraft trials of 1692. Assessments of the entire Puritan period have achieved their sharpest focus through an analysis of the Salem trials, which have served as a litmus test for theories about the nature of life in early America. Some social historians find the reasons for the trauma in economic causes, with the jealous resentment of the disadvantaged leading them to strike out against their circumstances as well as against particular social enemies. One localized version of this argument focuses upon the feuding factions of Salem Village, whose long-term battle seems to have predetermined the would-be accused and accusers. Cultural anthropologists and psychohistorians have read the Salem records as discursive expressions of anxieties brought on by the rapid succession of political and economic events in the 1680s, which were exacerbated by a series of crises, including fires, floods, disease, and Indian attacks. Other accounts emphasize the role of the common people, who discovered demonism to be a weapon with which to threaten the established powers. Because a high percentage of those tried and punished were women, a number of whom owned property under challenge, some interpretations present evidence of the efforts of jeopardized male authorities to repress rising female independence and economic autonomy. In different ways, most interpreters share the assumption that the Salem incident marks a critical turning point in New England history when old religious values were in question and new secular ones were being formed. Accordingly, the witchcraft delusion is most often perceived as the site of a profound cultural transformation.

Understanding the American Revolution is a literary pursuit, and John Adams assumes as much in his own famous summary of the event. “The Revolution,” Adams insists in 1818, “was in the minds and hearts of the people,” and those who would seek it must collect and search “all the records, pamphlets, newspapers, and even handbills, which in any way contributed to change the temper and views of the people.” By concentrating on this change in ideas, Adams makes “the real American Revolution,” as he calls it, the central event of the American Enlightenment, and he turns comprehension of it into a permanent test of cultural well-being. In urging this understanding upon “young men of letters in all of the States,” he also warns them against superficial explanations that stress “the gloriole of individual gentlemen.” The transformations in thought that bind Americans together in 1776 and after take place beneath the surface of events. Only by a diligent search can one hope to find the deeper truth of “radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people.”

This challenge, already problematic in 1818, remains the challenge of today. The task is to recover as much as possible of the Revolution, itself the greatest literary achievement of eighteenth-century America, while keeping in mind the gaps between surviving word and original thought, text and lost context, assertion and expectation, story and event. If “the real American Revolution” resists a narrative of heroics to reside elsewhere – in the minds and hearts of the people – how does one reach that level through extant writings?

First to study the Revolution, the historian David Ramsay also first proclaims the utter centrality of its writings. “In establishing American independence”, he observes in The History of the American Revolution (1789), “the pen and the press had merit equal to that of the sword”. Writings can equal events because events, small in themselves, often take their primary significance from the symbolism that language gives them. Five people die in the Boston Massacre; just eight, in the battle of Lexington. Clearly, it is not size and scale that shake the old order but something else. The international hue and cry of the Intolerable Acts in 1774 take place over 342 chests of tea dumped in Boston Harbor. In the war, General Washington's Continental army sometimes dwindles to fewer than four thousand soldiers, and that army's arduous retreat to Valley Forge in the winter of 1777 takes it only twenty miles from the British army in Philadelphia. Numbers are even smaller in the South. The battles of King's Mountain and Cowpens, major American victories in 1780 and 1781, engage fewer than three thousand at a time. Important in themselves, such incidents take their fullest significance from revolutionary ideology or from the way they contribute to a familiar sense of story and to an understanding of occurrence. Either way, the prime value of a revolutionary event is often in the telling.

It is doubtless too early to assess the break introduced by Michel Foucault, who has been Professor at the College de France (he holds the Chair of the History of Systems of Thought) since 1970, in a philosophic landscape previously dominated by Sartre and by what Sartre called the unsurpassable philosophy of our time, Marxism. From the outset, starting with The History of Madness (1961), Michel Foucault situates himself elsewhere. It is no longer a question of basing philosophy on a new cogito, or of developing a system of things previously hidden from the eyes of the world, but rather of interrogating the enigmatic gesture – a gesture that may be characteristic of Western society – through which true discourses (thus also those of philosophy) are constituted, with their familiar power.

If Foucault is indeed perfectly at home in the philosophical tradition, it is within the critical tradition of Kant, and his undertaking could be called A Critical History of Thought. This is not meant to imply a history of ideas that would be at the same time an analysis of errors that could be measured after the fact, or a deciphering of the misunderstandings to which they are related and on which what we think today might depend. If by thought is meant the act that posits a subject and an object in their various possible relations, a critical history of thought would be an analysis of the conditions under which certain relations between subject and object are formed or modified, to the extent that these relations are constitutive of a possible knowledge.