The Form of American Romance
| Author | : Edgar Dryden |
| Publisher | : JHU Press |
| Total Pages | : 230 |
| Release | : 2019-12-01 |
| ISBN-13 | : 9781421431130 |
| ISBN-10 | : 1421431130 |
| Rating | : 4/5 (30 Downloads) |
Download or read book The Form of American Romance written by Edgar Dryden and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2019-12-01 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
