This morning, I blegged about conservative literature. Then, in the mail, I received an advance copy of A New Literary History of America, from Harvard University Press. Flipping through this massive tome (1095 pages), I came across an entry called “The Plight of Conservative Literature,” by Michael Kimmage, a history professor at Catholic University whose recent book, The Conservative Turn, was praised on the pages of NR.

Anyway, here’s what Kimmage says about conservative lit:

The challenge, for conservatives, has been to sponsor literature as a living branch of contemporary culture. The conservative emphasis on precedent and experience, the anti-utopian cast of the conservative mind, leads conservative authors to autobiography, to a nonfiction reckoning with the dilemmas of history, politics, and the self. The literary imagination thrives on the left, where utopia has long been at home. … Autobiographies register raw experience. Novelists need a longer historical arc and a deeper reservoir of events than modern conservatism has given them. The conservative novel may be a figment of the future.