SOURCE: “F. O. Matthiessen's Labor of Translation: From Sarah Orne Jewett to T. S. Eliot,” in The South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 87, No. 2, Spring, 1988, pp. 355-84.

In the following essay, Cain examines Matthiessen's critical writings of the late 1920s and 1930s, maintaining that with these works the critic forged his identity as a literary critic.

F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941) is one of the landmark texts of American literary studies, and it is the book to which critics naturally turn when they examine Matthiessen's impact and influence. As Sacvan Bercovitch has recently stated—and many others have said the same—“American Renaissance reset the terms for the study of American literary history; it gave us a new canon of classic texts; and it inspired the growth of American Studies in the United States and abroad.”¹ But while Matthiessen's writings...