American historiography has always been preoccupied with American history. This is still the case in our present time. It is a natural phenomenon which applies in the same sense to other nations. Like other nations, too, America has always had historians who devoted themselves partly or exclusively to the study of the history of foreign lands. Within their guild they always were and still are a minority. Their position vis-à-vis the reading public and also vis-à-vis the subjects of their interest is more problematic than that of the historians who concentrate on the national past. For the American historian of foreign lands the question of a specific historical sense is not only inescapable but also more difficult to answer than for his colleague who writes on American history. As Leonard Krieger has pointed out a few years ago, this historical sense may be defined as the capacity to understand the temporally distant in its own terms together with the consciousness of its relations with the familiar. When the American historian of extra-American (i.e. in our case European) history finds the temporal distance extended by the geographical and cultural distance, he is quite naturally tempted to start out by asking of his subject: ‘What is it to me or I to it that I should aspire to study and understand it?’ This basic question can lead to interesting historiographical results, but it can also lead into the sterility of mere antiquarianism.

It has often been debated whether French opinion and enlightened philosophy could have influenced the Colonies between 1760 and 1773. Many students of eighteenth-century France accept the possibility. Many American historians have denied it, either because of their obsession with the purely economic causes of the Revolution or because of a semi-chauvinistic desire to ascribe the whole credit for the insurrection to the colonists alone. Mercantile dissatisfaction and national merit, though doubtless important as, respectively, a precipitant and a guarantee of ultimate victory, will hardly suffice to explain what was, after all, just as fundamentally a moral phenomenon.

‘The curriculum’, write Richard Hofstadter and C. de Witt Hardy, ‘is a barometer by which we may measure the cultural pressures that operate upon the school.’ These pressures are of many kinds, economic and intellectual, and they make schools and universities social, and even political institutions sensitive to external needs and demands. In the United States, where education has become one of the main secular goals of society, the history of schools and universities deserves to be an integral part of the social history of the country. Lawrence A. Cremin has shown how such an integration can be achieved. And now that ‘B schools’ in the vanguard of Le Défi American are spreading outwards from Manila to Manchester the time is ripe to study a phenomenon which most historians and sociologists, if they have not despised, have preferred to ignore.

With the exception of Sir Walter Scott and Fenimore Cooper, no two British and American writers of the nineteenth century are compared as frequently as Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. Yet, despite the far greater literary importance of Dickens and Twain, we are without a thorough understanding of the parallels in their work. Why does this problem exist? There are two basic reasons. The first lies in the thinness of Twain's comments on Dickens. If, to a modern critic like Ellen Moers, it is clear that Twain resembled Dickens in ‘the theatricality of his prose, the conception of the public as an audience of responsive listeners rather than as solitary readers, the episodic nature of his fiction cut to an oral rather than a literary measure’, to Twain himself it seemed unnecessary to make such an acknowledgement. In his fiction, as well as in his correspondence, Dickens's specific influence is at best marginal, and in his Autobiography he relegates Dickens to the position of the artist-innovator of the public reading.

From what Henry James writes in the well-known passage on the novelist's ‘need of the individual vision’ (Preface to The Portrait of a Lady), one is surprised to find him attributing absolute objectivity to the central character in another of his novels. A valid subject, he had said, is the result of some direct impression or perception of life; it springs out of the soil of the artist's prime sensibility. To represent adequately what he felt mattered about Isabel Archer, James had decided to place ‘the centre of the subject in the young woman's own consciousness’. He had rejected the easy evasive trick of giving only the general sense of her effect upon the characters surrounding her. To make theirs the predominant point of view would have been an escape from any close account of the subject. What then induced James on a later occasion to reverse this procedure without scruple? One can look first at James's account of the effect which this novel was to produce.

Carvel Collins's collection of Faulkner's Early Prose and Poetry, containing mainly material written between 1919 and 1922, with one or two items from 1925, introduces the reader to a young author who is not only concerned with questions of his craft but also engaged by several of the dominant aesthetic, intellectual and critical arguments of his day. Let me briefly list some of those engagements: Faulkner's review of Conrad Aiken's Turns and Movies and his renderings of Symbolist poetry demonstrate his interest in the proper language of poetry; the essay ‘On Criticism’ presents him sparring with notions of what good criticism could and should achieve; in his piece on Eugene O'Neill he expresses surprise that O'Neill had chosen to write first about the sea rather than about the more familiar land, and of W. A. Percy he says ‘like every man who…ever lived, he is the victim of his age’ (p. 72)—comments which hint at thoughts on the disparity between life and art (a recurrent subject in his poems), which was a chief critical point in the feverish debates of the time between the emerging ‘literary radicals’ like Randolph Bourne and Van Wyck Brooks and the ‘new humanists’, such as Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt. Also, in ‘American Drama: Inhibitions’, Faulkner stresses the importance of native subject-matter for the American writer, taking ‘the old Mississippi river days’ and ‘the romantic growth of the railroads’ (44) as examples. In the same essay, like Brooks and H. L. Mencken before him, he points out the comparative richness of the American tongue: thus it is no surprise to learn that Mencken's The American Language (1919) is listed in the Appendix to William Faulkner's Library—A Catalogue as one of the books Phil Stone ordered with his younger friend ‘in mind’.

Remarkably enough, Austin Warren calls Hawthorne ‘the unallusive Hawthorne’, but a mere four pages later he deduces from ‘The Hall of Fantasy’ in Mosses from an Old Manse that Homer, Aesop, Dante, Ariosto, Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, and Bunyan were ‘Hawthorne's pantheon of the greatest creators’ and that Fielding, Richardson, Scott, and even poor Charles Brockden Brown were among his favourite novelists. As a matter of fact, to today's casual reader Hawthorne's work appears rather generously sprinkled with allusions to other writers and works. In spite of George Augustus Sala's remark: ‘Nobody ever saw him read…A friend who knew him well told me that on his shelves Hawthorne had not twenty volumes, and that these were of the most ordinary sort’, Warren and others have established without doubt that Hawthorne was a voracious reader all his life. When he was a young man it was said of him, ‘He's read every book in the [Salem] Athenaeum’. Furthermore, when Hawthorne did quote an author or refer to him, he did so from actual knowledge of that author's works. The majority of his quotations and allusions Hawthorne carefully labelled as quotations and allusions; but, occasionally, either consciously or unconsciously, he quoted—or perhaps echoed—without attribution. To point out such a ‘quotation’ is the purpose of this paper.