ABSTRACT
While King’s works attend at length to the disentangling of the individual from the ennui and destruction of modernity (that most American of themes), like so many of his forbearers in American literature, King also expresses sincere doubts about the ultimate success of such an attempt. It has become rather fashionable of late to contemplate the metageneric qualities of his fiction, a trend that often presumes King’s breakage with (or, at least, ironic distance from) American literary History. Given the polymorphic character of his prose, a number of critics contend that King practices Harold Bloom’s poetic “swerve” to avoid the oppressive legacy of his literary ancestors. While we do not question the merit of these analyses—indeed, King’s historical moment is mired in this sort of metageneric work—we instead wish to consider King as the inheritor of a set of preoccupations from America’s literary past. Specifically, the generic confusion at the heart of King’s fiction reflects battle lines drawn nearly two hundred years ago around the tenets of American Romanticism. In this chapter we place King’s fiction in conversation with figures less typically associated with it, such as Henry David Thoreau and his contemporary, Herman Melville.
