American literature and its shadow worlds : Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, and specters of worldliness

[Extract] The relationship of American literature to the wider world is an old topic, one that can be seen in John Winthrop’s invocation of Christ in “A Model of Christian Charity” (1630) as an epitome of “the most perfect and best proportioned body in the world” (my italics), an image linked by Winthrop to the organic interrelation of his New England community as “members of the same body.” It is the question of whether New England should be seen as a microcosmic “model” for the whole world or, conversely, a separatist retreat from its corruptions that forms the crux of Winthrop’s argument here.[1] More recently, though, such idealist formulations have often been met with a skepticism deriving from a philosophical suspicion that the particularity of American perspectives could not readily be reconciled with universalist designs.