Critic as Provocateur
In a notorious essay, Leslie Fiedler contended that while European novelists such as Tolstoy and Flaubert were writing about adult heterosexual relationships, most of the classic American novels of the 19th century like Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Melville's Moby Dick were "boy's books" in which at their heart was a chaste homosexual bond (in Melville, there are multiple, interracial male pairings). The essay was entitled "Come Back to the Raft Agin, Huck Honey." In other essays, Fiedler prefigured cultural studies by writing about Superman and comic books, genre fiction and pop culture. This is literary critic as cultural provocateur, and Fiedler's major work will both enlighten and outrage. Of Love and Death in the American Novel, the New York Times wrote, "One of the great, essential works on the American imagination." This reader concurs.
