A diligent reader can glean from them a modicum of such knowledge and understanding [of "the broader patterns of culture" affecting the previous 60-70 years of lit production], but he may also feel that the time and energy devoted to their perusal is not commensurate with the small store of insights picked up along the way. Although one of them is genuinely thoughtful, and a second quite readable, these five books taken together tend to support a swelling suspicion that the great bulk of today's cancerously proliferating "literary scholarship" is hardly worth the candlepower, ink, and woodpulp attendant on its promulgation -- that such scholarship is more often than not an absurd irrelevancy, a tedious game conducted in such a fashion that it provides its bemused participants only small delight and its occasional spectators only wry laughter.

- Robert Lee White, "Five Expotitions into Americana"