[In Love and Death in the American Novel, Professor Leslie Fiedler] is not content with one or two or even a handful of his country's novelists; he embraces them all—or all that he considers of value—and relates them to his overriding theme. And, for good measure, he adds to them the Provençal poets, Samuel Richardson, "Monk" Lewis, Sir Walter Scott, Rousseau, Goethe, and several more. He has written a long book. Nor is he content with a scholarly audience; he reaches out to the general public, for what he has to say bears not only upon the American novel but upon "the American Experience", so inextricably entangled are literature and life. And throwing aside the caution and reticence that are commonly supposed to characterize the scholar, he speaks "with his own mouth out of his own face". He addresses us, he says, without a mask. (p. 161)
The instruments he employs for his purpose are three, in order of importance: D. H. Lawrence, Freud and Jung, and Marx—as he acknowledges. He owes his données to Lawrence. Lawrence's study of American literature is the most remarkable criticism he ever wrote: eccentric and opinionated, but yet extraordinarily perceptive and shrewd. He instinctively divined what he called the "duplicity of art, American art in particular"; and critics of American literature have ever since taken this as one of their assumptions. Professor Fiedler writes Lawrence large. His discussion of Cooper and Poe, Melville and Hawthorne is essentially Lawrentian.
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