This essay is an interim report on a long-term study of the chimera of the great American novel—the dream either of writing it or seeing it written. The project has three main facets: a chronicle of the dispensations of authorial, critical, and readerly pronouncements (a story with a distinct beginning, several middles, and no end); a historical-formalist comparative examination of several dozen aspirants and/or nominees; and a nation-and-narration metaperspective conceptualizing “American” narrative, in broadest terms, as part of a world system inflected by what Pascale Casanova calls the “Herder effect” (78–81), the postulate of each nation speaking in its own voice, within and against which its writers must thereafter contend, even such resolute cosmopolitans as James Joyce and Samuel Beckett.

This might seem a distinctly unfashionable project, out of phase with the push to think beyond/outside the confines of nationness for which Americanists, myself included, have lately been calling as a counterweight to the overemphasis on US literary and cultural difference—the “literature of our own” phase, as it were—that long marked Americanist field-defining work. But beyond this, great American novelism as such might seem so quaintly paleolithic, long since dead as a viable subject for literary history, criticism, and theory. As one recent manifesto by Alan Williams begins by asking, “Aside from pissing off the literati, does the Great American Novel, a monumentally 19th century concept, serve any higher purpose?”

Indeed, the dream of the “GAN”—initially reduced from Great American Novel to acronym status by none other than Henry James¹—has been killed off not once but at least twice. It degenerated into a media cliché soon after its first launch—on the same level, one nineteenth-century critic dryly observed, as “the great American sewing-machine, the great American public school, [and] the great American sleeping car” (Allen 1403). It was …