Denis Donoghue’s “The American Classics: A Personal Essay” (Yale University Press, 295 pages, $27) is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It is not merely a masterful, if galling, re-evaluation of five great American books – “Moby Dick,” “The Scarlet Letter,” “Walden,” “Leaves of Grass,” and “Huckleberry Finn.” It is also a sometimes galling critique of persistent american values.

There are many good instincts leading Mr. Donoghue’s stringent readings of the American classics. Not least, he sympathizes with the unsettled identity of the brand new nation, particularly chaotic in the decade before the Civil War. Mr. Donoghue suggests that “American literature, lacking the social order correspondent to a rational imagination, has resorted to abstractions and enigmas – the white whale, the river, Nature, the scarlet letter, genius – occluded the intelligible image, and paid the price of doing so.” That price was a deepening of our american hubris, which Mr. Donoghue regrets. To his chagrin and ours, he finds a willful arrogance near the origin of each of his five classics.

A classic, Mr. Donoghue proposes, is more than a good book; it is an event that supercedes questions of taste. His list is reasonable, and in excluding more recent works, he makes for a more coherent essay. Emily Dickinson is dismissed abruptly. She “is not at hand: no single poem has been given the status of a classic.” Mr. Donoghue’s writers share a profound debt to Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Emersonian individuality is his chief quarry.

Mr. Donoghue connects it to idealism, the easily assailable notion that truth is more in the mind than in the world. But what really disturbs him is Emerson’s arrogance. “[Emerson] was really an anarchist; necessarily so, since he cultivated the thrill of glorifying his own mind and refused to let any other consideration thwart him,” he writes. “You may think this a cheap thrill, as I do, but it was the only one that Emerson consistently enjoyed.” Mr. Donoghue is eager to dissuade critics who would define American democracy as specifically Emersonian; he convincingly shows that Emerson cared far more for the individual than for society. But in calling Emerson an anarchist, he makes the sage a politician again, in spite of Emerson’s intentions. What Mr. Donoghue calls “shocking” in Emerson’s writing – for example, Emerson’s claim that “that which we call sin in others is experiment for us” – is more descriptive than Mr. Donoghue allows. He reads Emerson’s descriptions of psychological experience as manifesto. Emerson did follow a sermonizing tradition, but as Mr. Donoghue would be the first to point out, he sought to address not the crowd, but the individual.

The outcome of Mr. Donoghue’s reading of Emerson is the emptying of “American values.” Emerson’s self-reliance is tautological:

To believe in your own thought is consistent with having no convictions other than the conviction of your genius. With that thought in mind, Emerson’s talk of genius seems an empty formula, not redeemed by being rampant in American culture … Tocqueville noted that many values proclaimed in America were similarly empty. “Society has nothing to fear or hope from another life; what is most important for it is not that all citizens should profess the true religion but that they should profess religion.”

But Tocqueville crucially distinguishes between society and the individual. In “Democracy in America,” the sentence that precedes the section quoted by Mr. Donoghue, Tocqueville provides that “though it is very important for man as an individual that his religion should be true, that is not the case for society.” Tocqueville is willing to grant the individual thinker a kind of honesty that would be dangerous for democracy, something that Mr. Donoghue scruples to grant Emerson. Mr. Donoghue finds in Emerson the seeds of American character as he imagines it manifest in the Bush administration. Emerson’s belief in genius is too close to what Mr. Donoghue calls the “spontaneous certitude” of the Bush administration. This conclusion is an opportunistic as it is timely.

In Thoreau and Whitman, too, Mr. Donoghue claims, individual consciousness is not investigated, but magnified. “[Thoreau] was at his best when he paid attention to birds, beasts, flowers, water, and soil rather than to himself in the act of paying such attention,” Mr. Donoghue writes. He regrets that Thoreau ultimately preferred imagination – his own darting descriptions, full of wordplay – to understanding.

Similarly, Whitman’s “I” who contain multitudes is “generic or representative rather than singular,” and thus Whitman’s voice can never respond to real life as it is lived. His free verse and indiscriminate desires do not abet real democracy, they create an imaginary world called democracy. “[Whitman] claims to have promulgated a new and better world than the one ordained by syntax and predication,” he writes. “Serial invocations repeal the laws of difference.”

About “Moby Dick” Mr. Donoghue declares that “We need an interpretation independent of the Americanization of politics and anthropology,” but the sum impression of his subtle, infinitely informed book is that such Americanization involves untold liabilities. Mr. Donoghue wants to reconsider the idea of transcendent wherewithal. “Charisma, in a man or a woman, is what a storm or a flood or a bolt of lightning is at large,” he writes, “a rush of being, exempt from judgment.”

It may be that American values – entrepreneurism, celebrity, upward mobility – are more about motion than meaning. But Mr. Donoghue insists on old-fashioned values. He compares his Irish Catholic notion of sin to the free-floating censoriousness of Hawthorne’s Puritans and finds the Puritans coming up short. He discounts the dynamic of ambition, that necessarily presumptuous feeling of self-projection. His cogent, powerful book challenges American literature at a deep level. But the game of brinkmanship with reality he describes did have some success stories, and without these, the story of American literature is incomplete.