Back in my graduate school days, hardly any critic of American literature was more influential than David Reynolds, and his magnum opus Beneath the American Renaissance (1988) became one of those touchstone texts that helped a lot of us imagine a way forward into our own scholarly pursuits. In that thick volume, Reynolds illustrated an almost exhaustive and at times uncanny ability to see hidden within the key literary texts of the 1840s and '50s the remnants, or "symptoms," of popular and social phenomena of the period. All these authors, he argued, "breathed the same air," tinged ponderously by a "subversive" mass culture; and as such, that air manifested in their literary creations—despite what those old-fashioned New Critics had previously told us. The conflicts, values, beliefs, and ephemera of popular culture (historical and legendary whale attacks, the soft porn and grisly crime reports of the penny papers, the loquacious new stylizing of contemporary preachers and reformers)—all this found its way into the masterpieces of the American Renaissance. Reynolds illustrated his theory and methods even more profoundly in his magisterial Walt Whitman's America (1995).
