Michael Boyden brings the tools of the functionalist sociologist Niklas Luhmann to the study of American literary history and historiography, but his common sense stands him in equally good stead. Arguing against a recent spate of “inflammatory” (12) interpretations of the making of the American canon that stress the workings of vested social interests to explain the “fundamentally exclusionist” bent of previous historiography (12), Boyden rereads some of the strong forces in the making of American literary history in terms of the “problems” they emerged from and of the interpretive “paradoxes” they resolved (17). The core paradox he explores is the way that American literary history no less than the American literature it studies consistently advances “utopian alternatives” and in so doing “constantly predicts its own undoing,” all the while lending the entire tradition a remarkable “stability” (12). The other side of this paradox, as Boyden elaborates in a series of four substantial chapters (on lingering Anglocentrism, the exclusion of contemporary literature, preoccupations with the nature of an American language, and the cult of genealogy), concerns the way that the apparently reactionary moves characteristic of American literary history in fact can be understood in terms of utopian – and sometimes radically utopian – motives. Boyden's teasing out of these motives is often both fascinating and persuasive.

The strengths of Boyden's work include first of all a comprehensive knowledge not only of American literature, but also of its primary theorists and historiographers, from the Duyckinck brothers to Sacvan Bercovitch, David Shumway, Werner Sollors, and Elizabeth Renker. Boyden adds to this an expert negotiation of vexed matters of literary value, in this case not to privilege the status of value or establish literary hierarchies, but to further a discussion about how the question of value functions within larger intellectual debates. Part of this negotiation involves an impressive series of micro-historical investigations associated with hotly debated critical issues such as the right way to frame Emily Dickinson or confessional poetry.

It must be said, though, that Boyden's openness has its limits. For one thing, his rhetoric sometimes veers from nuanced sociological language that attempts to discriminate an argument's function within a larger context to something less discriminating. (As, for example, “My larger aim in documenting these shifts in appreciation has been to show that the ‘confessional school’ of American poetry was not institutionalized through some ulterior design but as it were by default” (144).) For another, his laudable revisionary tolerance, which usually absorbs generational skirmishing as grist for the sociologist's mill, does not always exclude some of the academy's current shibboleths, as for example its reflexive contempt for modernism and/or new criticism (such as, “Rosenthal's universalization of the ‘confessional’ mode may have served to disaffiliate it from an overpowering Eliotic modernism” (140).)