- 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
- 1. Birth, Heyday, and Seeming Decline
- 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
- 3. The Reluctant Master Text: The Making and Remakings of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter
- 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
The Dream of the Great American Novel
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Product Details
PAPERBACK
$30.00 • £24.95 • €27.00
ISBN 9780674659896
Publication Date: 05/09/2016
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