History has seen few more grotesque ironies. In the past several years—while brave people in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, inspired largely by the example of American freedom and prosperity, have ousted the tyrannical Marxist regimes that enslaved and terrorized them for decades—a corps of Marxist humanities professors have carried off, here at home, a quieter but potentially no less momentous revolution of their own. As a result of this revolution, while Marxism has already expired in most of its former bastions and is in critical condition in many others, it is now flourishing in many of America’s most eminent universities. From Princeton to Stanford, from Amherst to UCLA, undergraduates who take classes with faculty members who call themselves “New Historicists” are being indoctrinated in the very ideas about life, history, and culture that millions of Russians and Poles and Estonians have struggled to overthrow—ideas of whose disastrous consequences over the past seven decades those students are often terribly ignorant.

Any reader who suspects that the alarm in the above paragraph is exaggerated is urged to examine the newly published Columbia History of the American Novel, which may be the single most frightening document yet to emerge from the Marxist assault on American higher education—frightening not for what it says about the novel, but for what it says about the current state of the American academy.¹ Like many a conventional literary history, it is divided into four chronological sections, which are in turn