Christmas, 1994, volume two will appear. The Cambrid~e History, edited by Sacvan Bercovitch, is the fourth and last ofthe major histories ofthe literature ofthe United States to appear in the twentieth century, and it is much the largest. The Literary History of the United States of 1948 and the Columbia Literary History ofthe United States of 1988 are each about 1200 pages total, while the Cambrid~e History of American Literature will, when completed, run in eight volumes to over 5000 pages.

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... st of us had the chance to write a contribution the size of a shortish book. That's why it was so exciting to participate and why it has taken so longe After the explosion of literary theory in the American academy of the 1970s, this new project challel1ged us to reinvent techniques for extended historiography, yet to do so in a discursive protocol that asked us to write without footnotes and without references to secondary works. Let us then go behind this smooth surface. To illustrate the role oftheory in the process of defining what was to be done, let me quote from a document I produced in early 1984, as a preliminary planning statement to circulate among contributors: "My major guiding hypotheses include the following three: First, whether personal,