ABSTRACT
During both stays in England, Vernon Louis Parrington had felt and written about a sense of dwelling in the world of American culture. The self-making that had been a personality key since his Harvard days was thus reconfirmed, although in a variety of forms, by his experience of dwelling between worlds and his attraction to the aesthetic, not political, strain in the theories of William Morris. Parrington’s adherence to individual self-making was certainly reinforced by his isolation in Norman. His activities can be seen as efforts to transform the Norman environment—the larger, public sphere—by means of an American adaptation of the Cambridge and Oxford model. In Cambridge Parrington first worked on the emotional core of the novel, referred to as the “love book,” then over the course of his European stay backtracked to write the opening scenes and key portions of later sections. In the fall of 1906, he began offering a new figures course on Ruskin and Morris.
