It might almost go without saying: a certain provincialism has been the besetting fault of the American Studies Movement. And surely it is this intense local bias of explanatory “style”— and not some more abstract failure of interdisciplinary “method,” or yet some ingrained resistance to “theory”— which explains why literary “Americanists” seem a little distrusted by many of their departmental colleagues. In an age committed to the transcendence, or else the self-reference, of literary speech, they have been somewhat more “historicist” in their persuasion. Worse, perhaps, they have meant to give a distinctly “American” explanation to phenomena which other trained observers cannot imagine as nationally distinct and would not consider privileged if they did. Americanists have been concerned with divergences from tradition; in their relentless pursuit of some American “difference,” they have elaborated the local and the peculiar at the expense of the universal, the traditional, or the generic. And this has seemed indeed provincial.

Observing this much (and suspecting much more), the critic would be rash to insist on the cardinal significance of every local reference in the learned but never pedantic tales and sketches of Hawthorne. The utter worldliness of Hawthorne's tone must count for something, surely. So too must the fact that his range of reference is almost as cosmopolitan as his reading was omnivorous. Yet there are strategies of reference to consider: hierarchies and directions and dependencies. And these are, in Hawthorne, often pointed toward the local, suggesting the mentality, if not always the methods, of American Studies.

Indeed, Hawthorne is the writer, I mean to suggest, who throws us back on ourselves, in spite of ourselves; in spite of himself even. He aspired to the condition of the worldclass authors whose meanings his allusions went out to touch; and we should like to admit him to that world. Yet the assimilation can never be complete, for he is the sort of writer who can scarcely be grasped at all without constant attention to his own local allusions— in a series of tales he himself entitled “Provincial”— to a sequence of writers one never expects to see on the syllabus of a course in “English” or in “Theory.”