Perhaps the best introduction to this book would be a brief account of how it came to be written. It began as part of a more inclusive study of Emerson and the American Renaissance that originated in my sense of a deep structural kinship among three of the major canonical texts of the period – Moby-Dick, Walden, and the 1855 and 1856 editions of Leaves of Grass – and between these midcentury writings and Emerson's 1837 oration “The American Scholar.” By “structural kinship” I had in mind something more than affinities of content or form rooted in the contemporary Zeitgeist or traceable in conventional ways to the literary and philosophical influence of Emerson. Despite enormous differences of genre, occasion, sensibility, and idea, the works seemed to share a common rhetorical architecture that could not be explained through the usual vocabularies of criticism and that seemed to point beyond the initiative of particular authors to a source in collective experience.

My subject, as I grew to understand it, centered on the complex relationship among individual and group consciousness, social processes, and literary form. Nothing I had read equipped me to undertake such a project or offered itself as a usable model. While New Historical theory and practice have gone far toward dissolving the traditional distinction between literary foreground and historical background, they have done so in large part by reducing the author to an inconsequential cipher amid the play of discourses and ideologies.