The first of the linked essays that make up What Was Literature? is called "Who Was Leslie A. Fiedler?" The answer to that question is the key to responding to the book title's question. Leslie A. Fiedler, as Leslie (now no middle initial) Fiedler tells us, was a literary critic who, for all his reputation as a rowdy, iconoclast, and clown, nevertheless proceeded from a principle dear to the academy with which he seemed to be in combat. This was the assumption that the amount of writing we can truly call literature is very small compared to the amount that is merely popular, or sub-literature, or trash….

According to today's Leslie Fiedler, it was this elitist Fiedler who in 1960 published Love and Death in the American Novel. Although today's Fiedler sometimes plays games with the historical record, he is certainly close to history when he portrays himself as...