Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Since the earliest days, writes Richard Chase in this classic study, the American novel, in its most original and characteristic form, has worked out its destiny and defined itself by incorporating an element of romance. In his detailed study of works by Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Henry James, Frank Norris, George Washington Cable, William Dean Howells, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner, Chase identifies and traces this tradition through two centuries of American literature.
The best novelists, he argues, have found uses for romance beyond the escapism, fantasy, and sentimentality often associated with it. Through romance, these writers mirror the extremes of American culture--the Puritan melodrama of good and evil, or the pastoral idyll inspired by the American wilderness.
Table of Contents
The broken circuit. A culture of contradictions ; Novel vs. romance ; The historical view ; James on the novel vs. the romance -- Brockden Brown's melodramas. Wieland ; Edgar Huntly ; A note on melodrama -- The significance of Cooper. Satanstoe ; The Prairie -- Hawthorne and the limits of romance ; The Scarlet Letter ; The a vs. the whale ; The Blithedale Romance -- Melville and Moby-Dick. How Moby-Dick was written ; An epic romance ; The meaning of Moby-Dick ; A note on Billy Budd -- The lesson of the master. The Portrait of a Lady -- Mark Twain and the novel. Huckleberry Finn ; Pudd'nhead Wilson -- Three novels of manners. The Great Gatsby ; Cable's Grandissimes ; The Vacation of the Kelwyns -- Norris and naturalism. McTeague ; The Octopus ; Norris historically viewed -- Faulkner-the great years. As I Lay Dying ; Light in August ; The Sound and the Fury.