Imagining America

<p>In his book <i>Imagining America</i> (originally published in 1980) Peter Conrad shows how the English literary imagination over the course of a century devised for itself a contradictory series of ideal or alarming Americas which it then sets out to actualize. For Mrs Trollope Americans are unkempt brutes throwbacks to savagery; for H. G. Wells they are a future race of cerebral technocrats. Oscar Wilde and Rupert Brooke want to redeem them by corrupting them with the insidious gospel of art; D. H. Lawrence wants to rescue them by fomenting revolution in their stale sterile society. For W. H. Auden Americans are an existential people sad citizens of a deracinated modern world suffering from anxiety; for Chrsitopher Isherwood they are bland sun-tanned Oriental angels. But there is a logic to the succession of these images which Peter Conrads’s narrative follows. The Victorians are disturbed by America because it is not yet a society and lacks the upholstery of manners. Their modern successors however praise it for this very disability and find there a psychological mystical or even psychedelic freedom denied to them by the Europe they have left behind.</p><p><i>Imagining America</i> is stimulating both as cultural history and literary criticism. Superbly written it presents an argumentative <i>tour de force</i> in a style that is witty and diverting.</p>