The American Novel and Its Tradition

Fülszöveg

In this brilliant and originál study, Richárd Chase defines for the first time those qualities which distinguish the American növel as such. Mr. Chase considers at somé length novels by Charles Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, Mark Twain, Hemv James, Frank Norris, George Washington Cable, Howells, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. Following a new approach suggested bv several of these a'uthors themselves, Mr. Chase finds that the distinction between the "növel" and the "románcé is the main critical question in understanding American fiction and in gaining a clear picture both of its characteristic greatness and its characteristic shortcomings. The author concludes that the American form of prose románcé has twp major sources - the Puritán or "Manichaean" melodrama of good and evil and the mood of pastoral idvl inspired by nostalgia for the simpler agrarian or frontier America of the past. THE AMERICAN NÖVEL AND ITS TRADITION describes the "broken circuit" of imagination... Tovább

Fülszöveg

In this brilliant and originál study, Richárd Chase defines for the first time those qualities which distinguish the American növel as such. Mr. Chase considers at somé length novels by Charles Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, Mark Twain, Hemv James, Frank Norris, George Washington Cable, Howells, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. Following a new approach suggested bv several of these a'uthors themselves, Mr. Chase finds that the distinction between the "növel" and the "románcé is the main critical question in understanding American fiction and in gaining a clear picture both of its characteristic greatness and its characteristic shortcomings. The author concludes that the American form of prose románcé has twp major sources - the Puritán or "Manichaean" melodrama of good and evil and the mood of pastoral idvl inspired by nostalgia for the simpler agrarian or frontier America of the past. THE AMERICAN NÖVEL AND ITS TRADITION describes the "broken circuit" of imagination that characterizes the native fiction, forcing apart eíements which in the English növel are typicallv continnous - eíements such as experience and morál evaluation, instinct and spint, fact and idea, emotion and intellect, the event and the observer's sense of the event, the past and the present. Mr. Chase finds that the vivid dialectic of the American növel accounts both for its profundity and brilliance and for its formai instabilitv and occasional incoherence. But although the author looks at his subject from a particular point of view, he does not confine himself to one line of analysis. THEAMERICAN NÖVEL AND ITS TRADITION takes wide and humane cognizance of the generál possibilities and pleasures of the növel. Vissza