The Form of American Romance

Originally published in 1988. Edgar Dryden challenges recent criticism that has tended to discredit—or at least devalue—the importance of "romance" as a thematic and generic category of American fiction. In The Form of American Romance, he examines its evolution and meaning through readings of five exemplary texts: Hawthorne's Marble Faun, Melville's Pierre, James's Portrait of a Lady, Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, and Barth's Letters. Each of these novels treats the problems of reading and writing in a self-referential way that reflects on the questions they dramatize, and Dryden has chosen each with the others in mind. Taken together, they chart a line of development with representative examples of what literary history calls romanticism, realism, modernism, and postmodernism, and thus they suggest a certain story about the continuity of the American novel.

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The Form of American Romance

Originally published in 1988. Edgar Dryden challenges recent criticism that has tended to discredit—or at least devalue—the importance of "romance" as a thematic and generic category of American fiction. In The Form of American Romance, he examines its evolution and meaning through readings of five exemplary texts: Hawthorne's Marble Faun, Melville's Pierre, James's Portrait of a Lady, Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, and Barth's Letters. Each of these novels treats the problems of reading and writing in a self-referential way that reflects on the questions they dramatize, and Dryden has chosen each with the others in mind. Taken together, they chart a line of development with representative examples of what literary history calls romanticism, realism, modernism, and postmodernism, and thus they suggest a certain story about the continuity of the American novel.

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The Form of American Romance

The Form of American Romance

by Edgar Dryden
The Form of American Romance

The Form of American Romance

by Edgar Dryden

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Overview

Originally published in 1988. Edgar Dryden challenges recent criticism that has tended to discredit—or at least devalue—the importance of "romance" as a thematic and generic category of American fiction. In The Form of American Romance, he examines its evolution and meaning through readings of five exemplary texts: Hawthorne's Marble Faun, Melville's Pierre, James's Portrait of a Lady, Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, and Barth's Letters. Each of these novels treats the problems of reading and writing in a self-referential way that reflects on the questions they dramatize, and Dryden has chosen each with the others in mind. Taken together, they chart a line of development with representative examples of what literary history calls romanticism, realism, modernism, and postmodernism, and thus they suggest a certain story about the continuity of the American novel.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781421431130
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date: 12/01/2019
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 274
File size: 1 MB
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Edgar A. Dryden is a professor emeritus of English at the University of Arizona. He also taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Table of Contents

Preface
Abbreviations Used in the Text
Chapter 1. The Thematics of a Form: Waverley and American Romance
Chapter 2. The Limits of Romance: A Reading of The Marble Faun
Chapter 3. The Entangled Text: Pierre and the Romance of Reading
Chapter 4. The Image in the Mirror: James's Portrait and the Economy of Romance
Chapter 5. Faulkner and the Sepulcher of Romance: The Voices of Absalom, Absalom!
Chapter 6. The Romance of the Word: John Barth's LETTERS
Conclusion
Notes
Index

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