The inception of American regionalism is routinely identified by scholars in either Robert Beverley or William Byrd II, both native Virginians who wrote intensely local works (The History and Present State of Virginia, 1705 ; The History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina, Run in the Year of Our Lord 1728) which are amongst the enduring literary products of colonial America. The regional base of both works is immediately apparent in their subjects and setting; but to stop here is to leave critical questions unanswered, questions which have in recent years begun to be addressed by ethnographers and historians such as David Bertelson, Michael Zuckerman and Kenneth Lockridge. In particular, Lockridge's study, meshing biography, history and social psychology, has proposed an illuminating “reconstruction of Byrd's personality” from his writings, an account which stresses Byrd's cultural predicament as a provincial Virginian who strove to be an English gentleman. My purpose in this paper is not to challenge such an interpretation, nor to propose an alternative historical viewpoint, but rather to add the perspective of literary criticism to our reading of Byrd's prose itself. I shall argue that the “ southernness” of Byrd's writing is a characteristic less of his subject matter — his Virginian material — or of his biographical limitations, than of his style, and that the History of the Dividing Line charts enduring preoccupations of Byrd's writing career which reached perfectly self-conscious apotheosis in this, his most carefully composed and corrected work.

We all know that the revolution in art – or the revolutions in the arts – that resulted in the emergence of what we loosely call “modernism” created a great deal of excitement and controversy. Noise and shouting filled the air. Critics opposed to the new currents saw in them the possibility of the destruction of everything noble in the Western tradition of the arts and perhaps even Western civilization itself. Defenders of the new ways were only slightly less acrimonious, if at all, and between the two there were continuing tumultuous and occasionally bitter arguments.

It is a curiosity of modern scholarship that the only general work on antebellum Southern Romanticism is Rollin G. Osterweis' Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South, which has been in print since 1949, is still read, and still –if only for want of a competitor –used. Yet much has changed in understanding of the social and intellectual history of the Old South, and even more of the phenomenon of Romanticism. These changes, natural enough over the span of two intellectual generations, have made many of that book's presumptions questionable; so a second look at the problem seems worthwhile, to clear the ground and to indicate fresh directions. For Osterweis wrote within the assumptions of the 1940s about the nature and shortcomings of Romanticism. He was guided by Irving Babbitt, who scorned Romanticism as a puling and exaggerated passion instigated by Rousseau, a disaster for rational men: at best silly, as with the jousts of antebellum Virginia; at worst dangerous, as with the secession convention of South Carolina. But Osterweis was Babbitt with a difference. While Babbitt and, more weightily, Ernst Cassirer had thought that Romanticism had led the world astray and it was still astray, with Hitler the avatar of Hegel as chilling evidence, Osterweis cheerily regarded Romanticism as a movement that had expired with the nineteenth century, a fossil safe to mock. To this perspective, largely adopted from Jacques Barzun's Romanticism and the Modern Ego (1943), Osterweis added the view of Arthur Lovejoy, who had insisted that Romanticism, while possessing a core notion of diversity and flux, should most safely be regarded as multiple: there were Romanticisms, not a Romanticism.

Racial and religious tension and conflict in New York City have dramatically increased over the past few years. Charges of ‘black anti-Semitism’ and ‘white racism’ abound, while meaningful communication between the races is less than it has ever been. The general context within which the situation has developed has been that of the growth of the Black Power concept and the resulting black challenge to the white economic, political and educational power structures. This challenge, so different from the glorious days of the civil rights decade of the 1950s when blacks and whites marched together in the South, represents a realization among black leaders that the basic problems of jobs, housing and education in the urban ghettos of America have to be solved before there can be any real progress of black Americans as a group. This, however, brings them into conflict with whites with vested interests to protect, and the resulting controversy has been bitter. An example of the break-up of the old civil rights coalition following the presentation of a challenge to white self-interest can be seen in the mobilization of the majority of Reform Democrats of the FDR–Woodrow Wilson Club to defeat plans to pair PS84, a predominantly white elementary school, and a nearby black and Puerto Rican school. David Rogers, in 110 Livingston Street, quotes one disappointed club member saying: ‘All their old liberalism went by the boards. They are liberal in the abstract, and when the problem is far away, say in Selma, Jackson or Birmingham, but not for their children or their schools and neighbourhoods.’ The same, as we shall see, could be said of the ‘liberal’ United Federation of Teachers.

Indian activists have recently complained about the pernicious attentions of white Indian ‘experts’, but they are likely to endure these attentions so long as their people retain a distinct cultural identity and national status. Unlike anthropologists and administrators, historians have not shaped the public policies applied to the native Americans, and so their expertise has seemed comparatively harmless. Yet having played a considerable part in misrepresenting the Indians, scholars have a duty to set the record straight with a minimum of unprofessional moralizing.

In an 1856 issue of Harper's New Monthly Magazine the literary critic and biographer T. A. Richards conducted his readers through a house tour of famous literary residences in the Hudson River Valley. His itinerary and choice of authors were typical of the time. By using the picturesque vocabulary common to antebellum travel literature, Richards offered a vicarious glimpse into the domestic arrangements of successful writers and artists. He painted an edenic picture of gentility in the midst of the Hudson Valley's natural splendor. We read, for example, of the “broad lawns and slopes of Placentia,” the Hyde Park estate of the novelist James Kirke Paulding; and the “mysterious evening shadow” of Susan Warner's home on Constitution Island, just off West Point. “Dearest to us of all,” Richards added, was Sunnyside, Washington Irving's renovated Dutch farmhouse at Tarrytown. These elegant and vaguely romantic properties seemed utterly appropriate for the literary elite of the region. Like Hawthorne's Old Manse, they were architectural spaces indelibly suited to their masters' talents and temperaments.

In the year of Lexington, the irascible Dr Johnson wrote to a correspondent: ‘The Americans, sir, are a race of convicts and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.’ Extreme in his Tory views, Johnson nevertheless reflected popular sentiment concerning the American colonies and their pretensions to independence, and his bias was to be reflected in many of the writings of the first historians who attempted to account for the late destruction of the first British empire.

Rome after the Second World War presented something of an anomaly. Of all the traditional capitals of European civilization it was the least affected by the conflict. Because of the Pope's presence, it had not been bombed, and it had escaped the heavy fighting in the campaigns to the south. Indeed, so easily was it taken that one film was to show the Eternal City captured by a single jeep. Italy was also faster to recover than any of the other combatants. American money flooded into the country, and political life was quickly under way again. All this made it a good place for visitors, a relative bright spot amidst a shattered landscape. Harold Acton, the English historian who went there in 1948, remarked that “After the First World War American writers and artists had migrated to Paris: now they pitched upon Rome.” Among those who visited Rome or lived there for a period after the war were Edmund Wilson, Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, Frederic Prokosch, Daniel Cory, Alfred Kazin, Samuel Barber, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick (slightly later), as well as Acton himself and a host of less well-known figures. Many were entertained by Lawrence and Babel Roberts, under whose influence “the Roman Academy became an international rendezvous for artists and intellectuals.” While they were there, a large proportion of these writers made a pilgrimage to the Convent of the Blue Sisters, where since 1941 George Santayana had been living in a single room.

My starting point is two related critical judgments. In a recent essay on the detective fiction of Ross Macdonald, Eric Mottram suggests that an important point in the history of such fiction is reached in Mark Twain's play The Amateur Detective (1877) and his short story “A Double-Barrelled Detective Story” (1902), parodies of the literary process of detection where “Twain demolishes the man-hunt plot and the Sherlock Holmes plot of aristocratic ratiocinative powers derived from Poe's Chevalier Auguste Dupin”. A quarter of a century before this, Leslie A. Fiedler came to the conclusion that Twain's most extensive treatment of detective work, Pudd'nhead Wilson, was “an anti-detective story, more like The Brothers Karamazov than The Innocence of Father Brown, its function to expose communal guilt.” The purpose of this essay will be to show how the process of detection was cited in Twain's writings throughout his career, usually but by no means inevitably in a parodic manner, and that Pudd'nhead Wilson needs to be understood as a serious, indeed, tragic parody of the detective story, one which turned most of Twain's models on their heads in order to demonstrate that a supposedly successful detective dénouement (what Fiedler elsewhere describes as “Pudd'nhead's book – a success story”) is deliberately allowed to work against its normal function in a detective novel.