The Dream of the Great American Novel

Abbreviations
Introduction
- - The Plan of the Book
  - Just How “American” Is the GAN Idea?
  - Why Now?
I. The Unkillable Dream
- 1. Birth, Heyday, and Seeming Decline
  - The Birth of the Dream
  - Defining the Terms, Somewhat
  - Monumentalism and Mockery: Dos Passos, Stein, and Others
- 2. Reborn from the Critical Ashes
  - Critical Professionalism and Paradigm Change
  - The Dream of the Great American Novel Miraculously Survives Its Discreditation
  - Chaos Configured? Morrison and Updike as Great American Novelists
II. Script One: Made Classic by Retelling
- 3. The Reluctant Master Text: The Making and Remakings of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter
  - Hawthorne as a Nonnational Writer
  - Provincial Discontent: Hawthorne’s Arts of Entrapment
  - Imagining Euro-Atlantic Diaspora: New England Derealized
  - Great American Novel Despite Itself: The Retellings
III. Script Two: Aspiration in America
- Introduction. American Dreamers in Context
- 4. “Success” Stories from Franklin to the Dawn of Modernism
  - American Dilemma: Uneven Development of Early Fictions of Development
  - (Mis)Making Men: The Franklin Legend as Model and as Target
  - Women’s Up-From Stories: Antebellum to Wharton
- 5. Belated Ascendancy: Fitzgerald to Faulkner, Dreiser to Wright and Bellow
  - Double Helix: An American Tragedy and The Great Gatsby
  - Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Beyond: Americanization of Observer-Hero Narrative
  - Dreiser, Wright, Bellow, and the Ethnic Turn in Up-From Narrative
- 6. Up-From Narrative in Hyphenated America: Ellison, Roth, and Beyond
  - Ellison’s Invisible Man as Literary Event
  - Surpassing a Classic Benchmark: Invisible Man versus Huckleberry Finn
  - Ellison to Neo-slave Narrative and Beyond
  - Roth’s American Trilogy: American Pastoral as Success Story “Undone”
  - The Way We Live Now?
IV. Script Three: Romancing the Divides
- Introduction. Shifting Ratios, Dangerous Proximities
- 7. Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Its Aftermaths
  - “The Greatest Book of Its Kind”
  - Self-Revision: Stowe’s Dred
  - North–South Divide Romances before and against Stowe
  - What Can Reform Fiction Do as Encore? Nineteenth-Century Novels after Stowe
- 8. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Its Others
  - Comedy as a Substitute for Politics
  - Unperceived Rivals: Cable’s The Grandissimes, Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition
- 9. Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, and Literary Interracialism North and South
  - Burning the House Down: Absalom, Absalom!
  - Recouping Tara: Gone with the Wind
  - Mirrors of Miscegenation for the Civil Rights Era and Beyond
- 10. Morrison’s Beloved as Culmination and Augury
  - Reinventing Tales White and Black
  - Refiguring the Divides
  - Afro-Atlantic Diasporic Imagination
  - Other Divides, Other Diasporas
V. Script Four: Improbable Communities
- Introduction. Fatalisms of the Multitude
- 11. Moby-Dick: From Oblivion to Great American Novel
  - First Lowering: Some Basic Terms of Engagement
  - Ahab, Ishmael, Melville
  - The Crew as Global Village and/or “Democratic” Microcosm
  - Moby-Dick as Cultural Icon
- 12. The Great American Novel of Twentieth-Century Breakdown: Dos Passos’s U.S.A.—or Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath?
  - Novelistic Architecture: Collective Fiction in the Machine Age
  - Democracy Derailed: The Fate of the Working Classes
  - Opinion Management
  - The Steinbeck Alternative
- 13. Late Twentieth-Century Maximalism: Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow—and Its Rainbow
  - Melville, Dos Passos, Pynchon
  - Plotlines
  - American Genesis of the Modern Rocket State
  - Mad Captains and Whale Rockets
  - Apocalypse When?
  - After Pynchon: DeLillo, Wallace, Vollmann
Epilogue
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index

Lawrence Buell

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