Pro tempore, No. 20, 2025.
Review article
Myth and Symbol School: Paradigms in the Studies of American Identity 1939–1956 (Summary)
Ruben Prstec
Abstract
In the pre-institutional and early institutional period of American studies, several scholars aimed to encompass and explain American exceptionalism, or rather ‘americanness’, by referring to selected 19th-century American intellectuals, their ideas and their (literary) works. In their studies, scholars such as Francis Otto Matthiessen, Perry Miller, Henry Nash Smith and Richard Warrington Baldwin Lewis aimed to create from American political and intellectual history a ‘useful past’ by which their American present could be explained. The origins of the American nation, American exceptionalism and Americanness they found in the Puritan legacy or a distancing from it; in American philosophy of nature or in the modified version of Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis. In their structuralist ambitions these scholars created and upheld myths with long-lasting effects in popular culture and American imaginary. Some of them are the American Renaissance of the 19th century (F. O. Matthiessen), the myth of the errand into the wilderness (Perry Miller), of America as a virgin land and the Garden of the World (H. N. Smith), of the struggle between nature and civilization (Miller) and of American Adam (R. W. B. Lewis.) This paper offers a short overview of the most influential studies of American identity and American history published in the period 1939–1956 and their authors, as well as summarize the relevant socio-historical contexts of their coming into being.
Keywords
Myth and symbol school; American studies; Perry Miller; Francis Otto Matthiessen; Henry Nash Smith; R. W. B. Lewis; frontier thesis; puritans; America; USA; myth; narrative
Hrčak ID:
349376
URI
Publication date:
20.9.2025.
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