The Cambridge History of the American Novel

by Cassuto, Leonard; Eby, Clare Virginia; Reiss, Benjamin

• ISBN13: 9780521899079
• ISBN10: 0521899079
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-04-29
• Publisher: Cambridge Univ Pr

Summary

This ambitious literary history traces the American novel from its emergence in the late eighteenth century to its diverse incarnations in the multi-ethnic, multi-media culture of the present day. In a set of original essays by renowned scholars from all over the world, the volume extends important critical debates and frames new ones. Offering new views of American classics, it also breaks new ground to show the role of popular genres - such as science fiction and mystery novels - in the creation of the literary tradition. One of the original features of this book is the dialogue between the essays, highlighting cross-currents between authors and their works as well as across historical periods. While offering a narrative of the development of the genre, the History reflects the multiple methodologies that have informed readings of the American novel and will change the way scholars and readers think about American literary history.

Table of Contents

General introduction

Inventing the American Novel: Introduction

Transatlantic currents and the invention of the American novel

Susanna Rowson, Hannah Webster Foster, and the seduction novel in the early US

Charles Brockden Brown and the novels of the early Republic

The novel in the antebellum book market

American land, American landscape, American novels

Cooper and the idea of the Indian

The nineteenth-century historical novel

Hawthorne and the aesthetics of American romance

Melville and the novel of the sea

Religion and the nineteenth-century American novel

Manhood in the early American novel

Sentimentalism

Supernatural novels

Imagining the South

Stowe, race and the antebellum American novel

The early African American novel

Realism, Protest, Accommodation: Introduction

Realism and radicalism: the school of Howells

James, pragmatism, and the realist ideal

Theories of the American novel in the age of realism

The novel in postbellum print culture

Twain, class, and the Gilded Age

Dreiser and the city

Novels of civic protest

Novels of American business, industry, and consumerism

New Americans and the immigrant novel

Cather and the regional imagination

Wharton, marriage, and the new woman

The postbellum racial novel

The African American novel after Reconstruction

Literary Darwinism and the rise of naturalism

Imagining the frontier

Imperialism, orientalism, and Empire

The Hemispheric novel in the post-Revolutionary era

The woman's novel beyond sentimentalism

Dime novels and the rise of mass market genres

Readers and reading groups

Modernism and Beyond: Introduction

Hemingway, Stein, and American modernisms

The Great Gatsby and the 1920s

Philosophy and the American novel

Steinbeck and the proletarian novel

The novel, mass culture, mass media

Wright, Hurston, and the direction of the African American novel

Ellison and Baldwin: aesthetics, activism, and the social order

Religion and the twentieth-century American novel

Faulkner and the Southern novel

Law and the American novel

Twentieth-century publishing and the rise of the paperback

The novel of crime, mystery, and suspense

US novels and US wars

Science fiction

Female genre fiction in the twentieth century

Children's novels

The American novel and the rise of the suburbs

The Jewish great American novel

The Beats and the 1960s

Literary feminisms

Reimagining genders and sexualities

Contemporary Formations: Introduction

Postmodern novels

The nonfiction novel

Disability and the American novel

Model minorities and the minority model - the neoliberal novel

The American Borderlands novel

The rise of the Asian American novel

Toni Morrison and the post-Civil Rights African American novel

Hemispheric American novels

The worlding of the American novel

The Native American tradition

Eco-novels

Graphic novels

Twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary communities

A history of the future of narrative

A selected bibliography

Index

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