D. H. Lawrence, in an early attempt to identify the "rhythm of American art-activity," wrote that American fiction characteristically dramatizes, in varying hues, the struggle to slough off the hardened skin of an inherited "European consciousness" and re-form the pysche according to a native, and implicitly, more genuine pattern. This impulse, transformed into an attitude, carries with it both the tantalizing promise of a continually renewed and enriched sensibility and, as Lawrence realized, the less salutary possibility of perpetual, aimless revolt, of congenital immaturity. In The Reign of Wonder, Tony Tanner explores the ways that American fiction has been shaped by the drive to unpeel from the self its accreted layers of convention and the mixed results that this has produced, lucidly tracing the story of how American writers have both benefitted from and collided with their nation's transplanted and idiosyncratically cultivated form of Romanticism. Approaching his exemplary writers on their own terms, he discusses the aesthetics of "wonder"-- the cultivated naivety that has as its aim an invigoration of vision, the re-apprehension of an obscured series of truths through varying forms of simulated innocence.

Taking as his starting point the Romantics' mis-reading of Rousseau (their upending of his belief that the child's undiscriminating perception was the natural overture to a mature, interpretive mode of understanding), Tanner goes on to identify Wordsworth and Carlyle as two pivotal influences on the Transcendentalists and thus on American literature as a whole. Emerson, in particular, was instrumental in reworking Carlyle's rugged brand of esoterism into a system that captured and helped to crystallize a national disposition. Expanding on the latter's belief in the virtues of the passive eye before a world in which any object, if seen correctly, could be "symbol of God," Emerson sympathized with the Scot's dismissal of history in favor of an eternal present, stressing the "entire independence of man, leaving him without history, location or society..." (10) Such an approach can lead to a highly adaptative style ideally suited to the challenges and complexities of a relentlessly protean nation and Tanner convincingly traces the ways that writers as diverse as Twain and Gertrude Stein, Hemingway and Whitman have remained obliquely faithful to Emerson's foundational myths. From the vernacular speech of Huck Finn to the paratactic syntax (the method of placing things together without trying to relate them) of Whitman and Hemingway, the strategy of wonder and its stylization have remained, Tanner writes, "a preferred way of dealing with experience and confronting existence among American writers." Emerson's theology of the symbolic yet discrete particular becomes the poetry of an emotionally resonant, "naively" experienced material world in Thoureau, Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and others.

The second part of Tanner's study, an extended essay on Twain, deals with America's version of the pastoral, the way the country bumpkin became the priveleged outsider, bringing together the unoccluded vision of the child and the "natural" truth of vernacular speech. The Emersonian aversion to prescriptive form, Tanner suggests, receives it homage in the archetypal figure of Huck, whose honest simplicity serves time and time again to rend hypocritical social veils.

Moving through the modernists, Tanner unexpectedly devotes his last chapter to Henry James, somewhat less convincingly yoking him to a tradition that he was in steady, if tender, opposition to. Although James sympathized greatly with the kind of innocence that Huck represents, he instead pulled his own avatars of Twain's holy fool off the raft, thrusting them into society, with all its mirages and treacherously subtle machinations. For James, the Emersonian, the enthusiastically self-reliant visionary, is ultimately doomed in a world that operates according to a strict set of invisible but omnipresent codes. More Emersonian in techinique is Hemingway, although his is a world of life-sustaining forms without the metaphysical comfort of the Over-soul, a world in which these forms sadly are our only salvation. Tanner takes up this theme again in his afterword when discussing Walker Percy's existentialist novel The Movie-Goer.

Tanner eloquently demonstrates that an essentially democratic approach to the sensory world has produced a unique form of literary art that, at its best, can lead to the ecstatic, omnivirous sensuality of Whitman, the taut suggestiveness of Hemingway, the painterly imagism of William Carlos Williams. But, as he concedes, the mthod is not always entirely successful. Taking both Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson to task for what he sees as a lack of synthesizing vision, he suggests that the danger of the consistently naive approach is that it can too easily succumb to a kind of listlessness, producing no "form because it gets lost among equally interesting particulars" (220). While such formlessness can be interpreted as a reflection of the artist's apprehension of reality, it can also ultimately be an evasion from the difficulties of organizing thought into a cogent, artistically integral pattern. Tanner's caveats seem particularly prescient thirty years later after the playfully inconsequential aesthetics of what is usually described by the catch-all post-modern-- the digitally amplified form of naivety that seems, if anything, to lend credence retrospectively to Tanner's thesis. While his study would have been more convincing had he made a few selective comparisons between American and European literature (he only glancingly mentions Camus in his discussion of Percy), his book is enlightening and provocative. Like all great works of criticism, it not only enhances our understanding of literature, but also tells us something valuable about ourselves and the ways we experience the world.