The dream of the great American novel
Lawrence Buell (Author)
"The idea of 'the great American novel' continues to thrive almost as vigorously as in its nineteenth-century heyday, defying 150 years of attempts to dismiss it as amateurish or obsolete. Lawrence Buell demonstrates that its history is a key to the dynamics of national literature and national identity itself. The dream of the G.A.N., as Henry James nicknamed it, crystallized soon after the Civil War. In in-depth readings of selected contenders from the 1850s onward, Buell delineates four 'scripts' for G.A.N. candidates. One, illustrated by The Scarlet Letter, is the adaptation of the novel's story-line by later writers, often in ways that are contrary to the original author's own design. Other aspirants, including The Great Gatsby and Invisible Man, engage the American Dream of remarkable transformation from humble origins. A third script, seen in Uncle Tom's Cabin and Beloved, is the family saga that grapples with racial and other social divisions. Finally, mega-novels from Moby-Dick to Gravity's Rainbow feature assemblages of characters who dramatize in microcosm the promise and pitfalls of democracy. The canvas of the great American novel is in constant motion, reflecting revolutions in fictional fashion, the changing face of authorship, and the inseparability of high culture from popular. As Buell reveals, the elusive G.A.N. showcases the myth of the United States as a nation perpetually under construction."--Jacket
eBook, English, 2014
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2014
Criticism, interpretation, etc
1 online resource (xii, 567 pages)
9780674726321, 9780674727489, 0674726324, 0674727487
871257583
Birth, heyday, and seeming decline
Reborn from the critical ashes
The reluctant master text: the making and remakings of Hawthorne's The scarlet letter
American dreamers in context
"Success" stories from Franklin to the dawn of modernism
Belated ascendancy: Fitzgerald to Faulkner, Dreiser to Wright and Bellow
Up-from narrative in hyphenated America: Ellison, Roth, and beyond
Shifting ratios, dangerous proximities
Uncle Tom's cabin and its aftermaths
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and its others
Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, Mitchell's Gone with the wind, and literary interracialism North and South
Morrison's Beloved as culmination and augury
Fatalisms of the multitude
Melville's Moby-Dick: from oblivion to great American novel
The great American novel of twentieth-century breakdown: Dos Passos's U.S.A
or Steinbeck's Grapes of wrath?
Late twentieth-century maximalism: Pynchon's Gravity's rainbow
and its rainbow
English