SOURCE: “Criticism and Politics: F. O. Matthiessen and the Making of Henry James,” in The New England Quarterly, Vol. LX, No. 2, June, 1987, pp. 163-86.

In the following essay, Cain contends that Matthiessen's ambivalent feelings about the work of Henry James provide insight into the critic's “conflicted attitudes toward the relation between literary criticism and politics.”

Probably more so than any other modern critic, F. O. Matthiessen legitimated the study of American literature. Not only did he define and develop the basic analytical method—a “close reading” of texts keyed to the articulation of central “American” myths and symbols—but he also did much to establish the canon of major authors. Matthiessen was not, of course, the first person to examine the writings of T. S. Eliot, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman, Dreiser, and others now securely a part of American literature as we know it; but in most...