In this, his first book, Paul Grimstad argues that the philosophy of classical pragmatism is anticipated in interesting ways by the literary experimentalism of the American Renaissance and later. With impressive scholarly range and command, Grimstad moves from the writings of C. S. Peirce, William James and John Dewey to those of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville and Henry James.

Central to Grimstad's account is a shift in the pragmatist notion of experience. For Grimstad's literary pragmatists, “experience” relates less to correspondence than it does to composition. Not simply “a squaring of inner with outer matters,” “experience” denotes process and experimentation; it is “a search for the conditions by which a work becomes shareable” (120). In offering a new account of the relationship between American literature and American philosophy, Grimstad relies on this cluster of key terms – experience, experiment, process, practice – with literary as well as philosophical flavour. Though quick to acknowledge his debts to the literary critic Richard Poirier, his work with these terms is nuanced and productive. Moreover, it is distinctive of Grimstad's book that it focusses on form rather than on language. Unlike Poirier's Poetry and Pragmatism (1992), the focus of Experience and Experimental Writing is romantic experimentation before modernist difficulty.

Nevertheless, Grimstad's book is at times a difficult read. No doubt this difficulty is in part related to the slipperiness of his central term (“experience”) and in part related to the nuance of his central argument. While for the most part Grimstad's chosen literary figures prefigure the philosophical, the author is not arguing for direct influence. Rather, he suggests a subtler affinity where novelists and philosophers converge in an experimentalism deeply pragmatist, deeply American. Each chapter of Experience and Experimental Writing builds from a particular literary-philosophical encounter. Chapter 1 brings Emerson into conversation with natural history and methodologies of taxonomy. Chapter 2 shows Poe prefiguring Peirce over the logic of induction. In chapter 3, Melville grapples with literary reviewers of his day, while Henry James, in chapter 4, meets his brother William in consideration of the local and the universal.

If the first chapter follows earlier commentators in emphasizing the significance for Emerson of experimental practice and the essay form, Grimstad's reading of Poe is more markedly original. He is particularly good on Poe's “The Raven,” nicely combining complex intellectual-historical context with creative close reading. Attention not only to rhyme and metre but also to sound and word patterning culminates in a stunning interpretation of Poe the poet, for whom profound tensions “between meter and sense” (56) reveal interesting cross-currents between composition for the literary author and composition (or “experience”) as potentially understood in philosophy. That rationality itself is experimental and open-ended is a pragmatist insight shown by Grimstad to be nicely captured by Poe's short stories as well as poems. The chapter on Melville is more difficult to follow. Here, perhaps, Grimstad could have done a little more to unpack the Melvillean mode of allegory and its precise relation to pragmatism.

That Emerson, Poe and Melville (not to mention Henry James) experimented on the level of genre or form is not in itself a profound insight. That this compositional practice might be productively linked to the philosophical anxieties of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America is, however, a scholarly task no less rewarding than challenging. What Grimstad manages very well with his chosen group of writers is close textual analysis illuminated but not subsumed by pragmatist context. To his credit, he is consistently careful not to privilege the philosophical over the literary. Experience and Experimental Writing is a brave and original book and it will be of interest to all those Americanists with investment in the philosophy–literature conversation.