148 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel
universalism” of Abraham Lincoln, the American political sphere
has at least professed to aspire toward inclusive, egalitarian values
that are rooted not only in the European Enlightenment, but which
also find strong resonance with cosmopolitan thought. 46
Leo Marx takes this line one step further when he argues that in
the early half of the twentieth century, the American “Left invariably
yoked their critique of capitalism to a passionate reaffirmation of the
egalitarian Enlightenment principles of the American revolution.”^47
There was therefore a fusion of American patriotic values with a
renunciation of “capitalism on the ground[s] that its inequality vio-
lated core principles of American democracy[... .] One heard the
tales of union organizers and Wobblies getting themselves arrested
by reading the Declaration of Independence on street corners”.^48
Although I do not contend that American values are intrinsically
socialistic, it is clear that they represent a set of principles that are
fundamentally concerned with equality and universal openness—
principles that are, of course, thoroughly at odds with the ideology
of segregation and that, as I note in the introduction, are important
to cosmopolitan thought.^49
I also maintain that Roth provokes the reader into recognizing
that these principles have been degraded to the point where they are
now only visible as sentimental caricatures in the mythical tropes
that romanticize a vague American pastoral heritage. Given that the
term “pastoral” is such a contested and complicated one, particularly
when we consider the diverging interpretations it inspires among
critics, it is necessary to elaborate on how it is used in the discussion.
There have been at least half a dozen major critics from the United
States as well as the United Kingdom that have made important
contributions to the study of the pastoral (both as a literary term and
more broadly as a concept within the cultural landscape) in the last
few decades. All of these agree that it is an aesthetic form that extols
the virtues of a close relationship between humankind and nature,
and that it was first associated with Greco-Roman poetry and drama
and was subsequently revived during the Romantic movements in
America and Europe.
Almost all major scholars to have written on the subject in the last
50 yea rs have criticized what t hey perceive to be its traditiona l lack of