Cultural Studies: Considering that the general external image of the United States these days is of a perpetually cocksure nation - awash in its own arrogant superiority - it is worth pointing out that, on the cultural front, there was a juncture in time when the country lacked cultural confidence; when the vast majority of American writers and artists were throwing backward glances over their shoulders to Europe.
Certainly, this was the case with early 20th-century American literature. The naturalists - such as Dreisler and Upton Sinclair - were all beholden to Balzac and Zola. In the theatre, the stern influences of Strindberg and Ibsen hung over so much serious drama. And in the visual arts . . .
Well, it's actually difficult to talk about any major American painter of stature and lasting gravitas until the New York School of modernists started to emerge at the end of the l940s (with Jackson Pollock leading the charge against the "nativism" of so much American art - as exemplified by Frederick Remington's cowboy paintings).
Then again, there is Grant Wood - the creator of American Gothic. First unveiled to the world in l930 and subsequently bought by the Art Institute of Chicago for a whopping $300, it has since become the most iconic of all American paintings. And just in case you've been in an enclosed order for the past few decades, here's an aide-memoire: it's that hyper-realistic portrait of an ageing Iowa farm couple, in which Ma is a model of granite-faced, laced-up, never-been-fully- naked-in-her-life midwestern rectitude, whereas Pa - with his emaciated skull, severe rimless spectacles and a black jacket worn over a pair of overalls - is sporting the Calvinist farmer look (especially as he's also holding a pitchfork).
Intriguingly, the man who painted this picture was a self-styled bohemian who fled to Europe, only to eventually throw off his adopted Parisian ways and reassume the mantle of the traditional no-nonsense mid-westerner (a standard American trajectory, by the way, as I know plenty of one-time 1960s dopers who now vote for George W).
And, ever since it first went on exhibition, American Gothic has always been subject to wildly disparate interpretations. As Steven Biel writes in his short, amusing study of this most-copied of American paintings: "Critics who admired American Gothic in the early 1930s agreed with those who loathed it that the painting was satire. It lampooned American rural small-town life, its rigidity and provincialism, its repressed and oppressive people, pinched, puritanical Bible-thumpers . . ."
By the early l980s, however, the New York Times art critic, Hilton Kramer, launched a jeremiad against the painting, stating that "it released high culture from its obligation to be entirely serious, to insist on difficult standards, to sustain an attitude of unassailable rectitude".
As Biel also notes, Kramer even went so far to say that "a more virulent version" of Wood's regionalism had been "official government policy in Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany", and that his entire body of work "could confidently be regarded as a dead issue for everyone but a handful of diehard provincials nursing their grievances against a cosmopolitan culture they could neither appreciate or ignore".
But while Kramer went just a little ballistic about the painting, many Reagan-era conservatives embraced Wood as an authentic, wholesome American master.
As can be gathered, Biel's quirky little book cleverly uses American Gothic as a vehicle by which to investigate America's ongoing cultural wars, in which the forces of traditional "we are God's preferred terrain" values are pitted against the urban East Coast intelligentsia, whom the Bush administration has constantly characterised as latte-drinking, Chardonnay-sipping, French-loving exponents of Sodom and Gomorrah ethics.
Given that this cultural war has reached new, virulent heights since Dubya entered the White House, Biel's book couldn't be more timely. And the scholarship on show here is impressive (then again, the writer does teach at Harvard). He also happens to wear his erudition lightly and (with a few lapses) manages to dodge the sort of rigid, humourless academic style that can creep into extended monographs such as this one.
Beware, however: like most ivory tower residents, Biel is obsessive about detail, and I would wager big bucks that he has dug up just about every cultural reference made about American Gothic in the past 75 years. Some of these are splendid ("Barbie and Ken meet American Gothic on a Hallmark anniversary card" and Robert Hughes going way off-key and calling the painting the work of "a timid and deeply closeted homosexual"). Some are just puerile (I really didn't need to know what Irene Ryan - she of Beverly Hillbillys fame - thought about the painting).
These small quibbles aside, this is a shrewd piece of work - and one which simultaneously examines the complex undercurrents of the American cultural landscape, while also showing how the painting has so permeated the American psyche to become the defining piece of national art. As such, American Gothic still stands as either a piece of lasting kitsch or the precursor to Andy Warhol's oeuvre - or perhaps both.
And what did the guy who wielded the brushes actually think about the work that became such a coast-to-coast talking point? As it turned out, Wood spent much of his life giving "so many contradictory accounts of American Gothic . . . that the question of whether it is in essence satirical, fortunately, can't ever be settled".
Then again, Wood was merely the artist here - so what the hell would he know about his painting?
Douglas Kennedy's new novel, State of the Union, is published by Hutchinson in October
American Gothic By Steven Biel WW Norton, 215pp. £13.99