Featuring some two hundred chapters and weighing in at over 1,100 pages, Harvard's New Literary History of America involves an attempt to reclaim the field of American literary studies from what its editors take to be the obfuscations of critical theory. The book is organized chronologically, from the first appearance of the name “America” on a map in 1507 to the election of Barack Obama in 2008, with each of its relatively brief essays highlighting what Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors describe in their introduction as “points in time and imagination where something changed” (xxiv).

There are many distinguished contributors to this book and many fine pieces here, both on canonical American authors (Anne Bradstreet, Wallace Stevens) and also on icons of the broader culture (country music, the skyscraper, Linda Lovelace). Though various academic luminaries have their say, one unusual and attractive aspect of this book is the prevalence of perspectives from creative writers and artists, who offer their own, often idiosyncratic, angle on particular aspects of US cultural history: Bharati Mukherjee on The Scarlet Letter, Walter Mosley on hard-boiled fiction, Gish Jen on The Catcher in the Rye, and so on. Sollors said in a symposium on this project at Harvard in 2009 that the editorial team was attempting deliberately to “get off the MLA track,” and critiques of these kinds from outside the world of conventional scholarship offer illuminating double perspectives, whereby, for instance, the novelist Mary Gaitskill's investment in sexual politics induces an interestingly charged reaction on her part to Norman Mailer's writings of the 1960s.

There are, however, many conceptual problems with the overall shape of this History, mostly relating to its chronic lack of perspective. By choosing to fetishize particular moments, the editors risk losing any coherent sense of how larger cultural forces operate. It is easy enough to understand the sense of relief at not having simply to label periods “antebellum” or “postmodernist,” as in standard undergraduate lectures or stodgy critical anthologies. But by dispensing with larger historical trajectories entirely, Marcus and Sollors risk producing an altogether misleading account of US culture by the way they adduce synecdoches which often misfire. It is, for example, not just offbeat but quite absurd to represent F. O. Matthiessen by his first meeting with Russell Cheney in 1924, rather than to discuss the significance of his critical writings in the 1940s, or to assign Ronald Reagan to “October 27, 1964,” the date of his famous television speech campaigning on behalf of Barry Goldwater, rather than discussing more substantially the effects of his presidency in the 1980s. Admittedly, this focus on a specific date can sometimes pay rich dividends, as in Avita Ronell's essay on the cultural implications of the invention of the telephone in 1876, or Kathleen Moran's fine piece on Jack London's response to the San Francisco earthquake on 18 April 1906. At other times, however, Marcus's particular contempt for “large historical forces,” which he declared in the Harvard symposium to be “overrated” phenomena, leads to a quite bizarre emphasis on individualism, contingency and the haphazard nature of events as keys to all American understanding. Indeed, a more apt title for this book would have been “A New Journalist Literary History of America.”

Because of their sheer scope and ambition, large institutional histories of this kind that seek to define literary or cultural canons always tend to leave intellectual loopholes that render them vulnerable to attack on many fronts. The mobile, maverick nature of this Harvard project does have certain charms, especially by comparison with the more stentorian approach of the multivolume Cambridge History of American Literature. In theoretical terms, however, Harvard's New Literary History is by no means so iconoclastic as it thinks it is, since its structure is beholden implicitly to old-fashioned ideas about US cultural continuities that ruled the roost during the “myth and symbol” phase of American studies some fifty years ago. Many contributors in their final paragraph highlight links between past and present – Jonathan Edwards is related to Billy Graham (80), Washington Irving to H. P. Lovecraft (149) – and indeed transhistorical analogies of these kinds become so commonplace, even mechanical, that it looks as if contributors must have been asked especially to emphasize them by the editors. This leads to many diachronic generalizations about inherent American values: Chuck Berry, for example, is celebrated for his “declaration of cultural independence” by recording “Roll over Beethoven” on 16 April 1956 (871), while Marcus himself, in possibly the worst published critical essay on Moby-Dick I have ever read, describes the last chapters of Melville's novel as “an action movie, a nineteenth-century version of Steve McQueen's car chase in Bullitt” (285).

The prime mover behind this project was Lindsay Waters, executive editor for the humanities at Harvard University Press, whose principled commitment to an escape from abstract academic jargon is exemplified by his own tribute here to the “popular art” of James Jones's From Here to Eternity (823). There is much that is provocative and insightful in this book, but the ramshackle nature of its organization means it is not entirely clear for whom the work might ultimately be most useful. The fact that it is being marketed as a trade rather than an academic publication suggests that Waters is looking for a large general readership – indeed, it was named as a “Time Out New York Gift Book of 2009” – and the extensive nature of the material covered in an accessible manner should make the book attractive to ambitious high-school students as well as to the wider public. As a crossover project, however, Harvard's New Literary History effectively short-changes the academic state of the subject, and it could hardly be recommended to students beyond the undergraduate level.