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In Splintered Worlds, Robert M. Greenberg examines the way the romantic ideal of diversity enabled four American writers to deal with the overwhelming fragmentation of their mid-nineteenth-century world. Greenberg distinguishes between two types of fragmentation in American literature and culture: segmentary and atomistic. The segmentary vision of reality, which emphasizes multiplicity and abundance, is discussed in the works of Emerson and Melville; the atomistic vision, which emphasizes incompleteness and isolation, in Whitman and Dickinson.
The study also relates these two prototypical visions of reality to the nineteenth-century socio-cultural environment. The crowded, yet lonely, streets of cities; the rise of new religious sects challenging established denominations; and the conflicts between empiricism and romanticism in philosophy are each treated in discrete sections as well as anchored in chapters of literary analysis. For example, after discussing the rise of empiricism in America, Greenberg describes the influence of pre-Darwinian evolutionary ideas on Melville's approach to the whale in Moby-Dick. After relating the rapid growth of New York City, the author discusses how the sense of estrangement in the City played a part in Whitman's need to embrace social multiplicity. And, after describing the rise of evangelicalism in New England, he looks at Emily Dickinson's rejection of it in favor of an antiformalist and antidoctrinal impulse in the writing of poetry.
Greenberg argues that a changing society produced a literature typified by relativism and that writers were searching for forms that could re-create and incorporate the experience of being confronted by, inundated by, competing perspectives. The author of Splintered Worlds sees a reciprocal influence between democracy and the romantic ideal of diversity. He believes not only that the inclusive literary forms used by American Renaissance writers were derived from the pluralistic democratic climate, but that the conception and images of the self and society were changed by literary "diversitarianism."
In broadest terms, this well-crafted revisionist account asserts a unique representational relationship between literary text and historical scene. By specifying extrinsic cultural realms in works that sprang in part from idealist or symbolist visions of life, the volume ultimately argues that Emerson, Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson created analogous artistic experiences that simulated the sense of multiple things and multiple viewpoints.
