The ambitious goal of this book is to treat American writers less as writers than as “surveyors” of national customs. With coverage from the 1540s to the present, with most of the focus on the 1840s–1940s, wide-ranging hardly begins to describe this effort. Invoking enough primary texts to fill an anthology, Pfister's announced method of “systemic reading” (17) is invested in often unexpected, cross-historical juxtapositions. Readings are arranged in three broad chapters: one, on the workings of “soft capitalism”; two, on capitalism's modes of “incentive management” for individuals; and three, on American “dress-down” culture. This third chapter is perhaps the best showcase for Pfister's cross-section of texts and writers. Its topic is the ways in which cultural colloquialism – for example, informality of manners and homespun dress – are used to affect, however misleadingly, that one is of the people. It is a version of the argument made by political writer Thomas Frank, who is named in the chapter's initial framing, about the uses of democratizing rhetoric to uphold undemocratic hierarchies of power.Footnote ¹ This section of the book is also the most conventionally historicizing and author-focussed, offering an extensive reading of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), though it broadens to touch on many writers, including Benjamin Franklin, Stephen Crane, W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles Chesnutt, Walt Whitman, and William Faulkner.

The sections on soft capitalism and incentive management offer not so much a set of takeaway arguments as occasions for organizing a constellation of texts and contextualizations. The mix-and-match approach includes dozens of writers, ranging from Jonathan Edwards to Sherman Alexie in one chapter and from Lydia Hunt Sigourney and Herman Melville to Eugene O'Neill and Richard Wright in another. “Soft” capitalism essentially means everything that does not belong to the “hard” sphere of economics: it includes “styles of life,” “forms of self-expression,” emotional logics, and whatever cultural forms might be considered “compensatory” for the hard realities of wages, labor, and class (34). The definition of incentive management is also quite general; it means capitalism's creation of “personnel” through the avenues of the personal, or the ways in which capitalist workers are ideologically shaped through “structures of emotional attachment, gendered interdependencies, and domestic compensations” (35). Together these chapters are meant to encompass American capitalism's various systems of cultural reproduction, its role in the formation of individual selfhood, and its investment in what Pfister calls the “secular interiority incitement business” (53). Without zeroing in on a specific aspect or definition of capitalism, however, these chapters provide not a basis for critical argument about its workings but a general backdrop for discussing social reproduction in the most general sense – a discussion that, for example, might move from American turn-of-the-nineteenth-century dystopian fiction to the poetry of John Keats to the example of Joseph Stalin in the space of a paragraph.

Readers interested in current methodological debates may ask how reconceiving American literature as a “cultural-theoretical and historical resource” (166), in which primary evidence and secondary criticism arrive already packaged together, yields something measurably different than other ways of reading it. The book does not directly address recent challenges to historicist and cultural methods, such as new formalisms, for example. It models an apparent desire to go “back” to the text in some more fundamental sense. To argue that writers wrote as theorists, historians, and cultural “surveyors” is to insist on the obvious fact that literary texts work in multiple registers. But while it can be useful to be reminded that theory and example are not fully separable, the book does not acknowledge the curious antitheoretical resistance that is implied in statements such as “in the Gilded Age Twain advanced [the concept of hegemony] in ways that extend what Gramsci wrote four decades later” (123) or “America's literary surveyors scrutinized the gendering of subjectivity, performance, and embodiment long before feminist studies brought feminist theory to literature” (16). Such statements suggest unspoken opponents, arguments, and assumptions lurking beneath the surface of the discussion. Ultimately, the book represents contemporary criticism as trapped between rival methods – one that crudely applies theoretical ideas to texts and another that values literary appreciation with no theory mixed in at all. However, without naming names in these implied arguments about literature's practical “usefulness,” or engaging specific critics’ readings of its primary texts, the book is, finally, less an intervention into methodological debates or a consideration of literary versus historical evidence than an example of the effort to synthesize broadly from a canon that is already determined to be literary from the outset. “Surveying” becomes a critical approach that ultimately revalorizes the great books for their historical, theoretical, and pedagogical complexity. Perhaps we might even say that this return to the literary text places the preexisting canon in a position roughly equivalent to that of Twain's father, in the quotation famously (if erroneously) attributed to the writer himself: “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.”