ABSTRACT
Leslie A. Fiedler (b. 1917) is a prolific writer on many different subjects, but is probably best known as the author of Love and Death in the American Novel (New York, 1960), a brilliant, controversial work which Fiedler himself has invited his readers to l'egard 'not as a conventional scholarly book-or an eccentric one-but a kind of gothic novel (complete with touches of black humour) whose subject is the American experience as recorded in our classic fiction' (preface to the second edition of 1966). Fiedler is one of those critics of American literature and culture who have evidently been inspired by D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature (see above, pp. 122-7). Like Lawrence, Fiedler emphasizes, instead of apologizing for, the non-European qualities of American literature, and writes about it in a free-wheeling, provocative, speculative, idiomatic style, drawing eclectically on psychology, anthropology, mythology, and history for illumination. One should not, of course, press the parallel too far: Fiedler writes from within the American experience, and accepts-indeed, celebrates-the mass culture of modern urbanized America which Lawrence would certainly have rejected fiercely. Yet when Fiedler observes of comic books, 'In a society which thinks of itself as "scientific"-and of the Marvellous as childish-such a literature must seem primarily children's literature', one cannot help being reminded of Lawrence's warning against thinking 'of the old-fashioned American classics as children's books'.
