. New York; Viking Press, 1981 ; één deel in-8°. Prijs : S 20.00. - What is distinctively, unmistakably American about American literature ? In Literary Democracy, Larzer Ziff provides a rich and vital resource into the "cultural independence of America". By juxtaposing and evaluating images of American independence in subtle and provocative ways, Mr. Ziff evokes the dynamism of American literary culture and, in so doing, follows and develops upon the two most significant critics of American culture, Van Wyck Brooks and F. O. Matthiesen. Like Brooks' The Flowering of New England and The Times of Melville and Whitman and Matthiessen's American Renaissance, Mr. Ziff seeks new and ever deeper interpretations of what America is.

What occurred in American literature during the period from the Great Panic of 1837 to the end of the Civil War in 1865 was, Mr. Ziff shows us, in most aspects indistinguishable from what occurred to American society as a whole. American writers such as Poe, Whitman, Hawthorne, Melville, and Thoreau did not require social historians to explain that explosions of industrial power, agrarian development, and population shift and growth were creating an entirely new American way of life. The innovations in form created by Thoreau in Walden, Whitman in Leaves of Grass, Melville in Moby-Dick, and Poe in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque were designed to explore and comprehend new modes of thought and feeling. American writers discovered, Mr. Ziff observes, that "America meant more than a new setting for time-honored forms ; it meant a new way of perceiving reality". This America did not possess a history of its own. Deliberately putting aside European historical tradition and literary forms, American authors were empowered by the potential idea that their true history was natural history ; theirs was a mythic tale of man remade by a new environment.