This essay reviews two major contributions to the study of the American literary romance, and two recent issues of the annual, Studies in the American Renaissance. George Dekker's The American Historical Romance (1987) and Edgar A. Dryden's The Form of American Romance (1988) are situated in the context of definitions and theorizations of the American romance genre that have dominated scholarly debate: D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1924), F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance; Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941), Charles Feidelson, Symbolism and American Literature (1953), Daniel Hoffman, Form and Fable in American Fiction (1965), Joel Porte, The Romance in America: Studies in Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and James (1969), Michael Davitt Bell, The Development of American Romance: The Sacrifice of Relation (1980), Michael T. Gilmore, The Middle Way: Puritanism and Ideology in American Romantic Fiction (1977), Walter Benn Michaels, "Romance and Real Estate," (1985), and Evan Carton, The Rhetoric of American Romance; Dialectic and Identity in Emerson, Dickinson, Poe, and Hawthorne (1985).