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The American Novel series provides students of American literature with introductory critical guides to the great works of American fiction. Each volume begins with a substantial introduction by a distinguished authority on the text, giving details of the work's composition, publication history, and contemporary reception, as well as a survey of the major critical trends and readings from first publication to the present. The overview is followed by newly commissioned essays and a guide to further reading. The series is an invaluable resource for all undergraduates engaged in the critical analysis of major American novels.'Winners not only because of the generally high level of performance of the separate essayists but also because of the informative, witty overviews by their editors.'American Fiction

  • Senior Editors: Emory Elliot, University of California, Riverside

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24 results in The American Novel

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New Essays on White Noise
  • Edited by Frank Lentricchia
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    30 August 1991
  • White Noise, the story of a professor of Hitler Studies and his family was DeLillo's breakthrough book and has received much attention and critical acclaim. In the introduction to this volume, Frank Lentricchia provides an overview of the critical reception of the novel and examines it in the context of other works by Don DeLillo. The other essays in the volume discuss DeLillo's view of family and divorce, Hitler's role in the twentieth century, technology as a mortal threat, and postmodern America. This collection offers suggestive means by which to approach DeLillo's important contemporary work.

New Essays on Invisible Man
  • Edited by Robert G. O'Meally
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    25 March 1988
  • Published less than fifty years ago, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man shares with older classic works the odd quality of seeming to have been in place much longer. It is a novel that encompasses much of the American scene and character: though told by a single Afro-American voice and set in the contemporary South and then in modern New York City, its references are to the First World War, to Reconstruction, to the Civil War and slavery, to the founding of the American republic, to Columbus, and to the country's frontier past. In his introduction to this volume Robert O'Meally discusses Ellison's fictional strategies for reaching a wide audience while remaining true to his own artistic vision and voice. Then each of five critical essays explores a different aspect of this capacious novel. One looks at the novel's protagonist as an embattled artist-in-training: another focuses on the novel's political and philosophical backgrounds; a third discusses the style and meaning of the nameless narrator's speeches; a fourth examines the novel's modernism in light of its references to jazz and anthropology: and the final essay considers Invisible Man as a kind of war novel. Written in an accessible style, these essays represent the best of recent scholarship and provide students with a useful introduction to this major novel.

New Essays on Sister Carrie
  • Edited by Donald Pizer
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    26 July 1991
  • Sister Carrie (1900), Theodore Dreiser's first novel, is one of the seminal works in American literature because of Dreiser's ground-breaking dramatization of the tragic life led by men and women in the modern American city. The introduction by Donald Pizer describes in detail the biographical and historical background of the novel and its critical reputation. The four original essays in this 1991 volume not only touch on long-established approaches to Sister Carrie but also reflect a number of the concerns of scholarly and critical movements. Each of the essays is a self-standing examination of a major area of interest in the novel, including such topics as the impact of Dreiser's own life on the creation of Carrie and Hurstwood, the relationship of Carrie and the theater, and Dreiser's naturalism and his narrative technique.

New Essays on Native Son
  • Edited by Keneth Kinnamon
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    27 April 1990
  • New Essays on Native Son provides original insights into this major American novel by Richard Wright. After an introductory essay by the editor on the conception, composition, and reception of the novel, four leading Afro-Americanists examine various aspects of this classic fictional account of violent life and death in a racist society. John M. Reilly shows how carefully Wright utilises narrative techniques to subvert conventional American racial discourse and to establish the authority and authenticity of the protagonist's voice. Trudier Harris explores some of the social ironies involved in the novel's unfavourable presentation of female characters. Houston A. Baker Jr, focuses precisely on the concept of place in a new historicists treatment of black male and female roles in Native Son against Wright's own interpretation of Afro-American history in 12 Million Black Voices. Finally, Craig Werner convincingly relates Native Son to modernism as a literary movement. Moving beyond the old debate between protest and art, these essays, informed by new critical theory and perspectives, reveal previously unsuspected depth, complexity, and resonance in Wright's vision of black life and his literary resources in expressing it.

New Essays on The Catcher in the Rye
  • Edited by Jack Salzman
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    28 February 1992
  • First published in 1951, Catcher in the Rye continues to be one of the most popular novels ever written as well as one of the most frequently banned books in the United States. In his introduction to this volume, Jack Salzman discusses the history of the novel's composition and publication, the mixed reception it received from critics and scholars, the arguments surrounding the attempts at censorship, and its position in a postmodernist literary world. The five essays that follow focus on various aspects of the novel: its ideology within the context of the Cold War, its portrait of a particular subculture within American society, its account of patterns of adolescent crisis, and its rich and complex narrative structure.

New Essays on Call It Sleep
  • Edited by Hana Wirth-Nesher
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    13 June 1996
  • Henry Roth's Call It Sleep, praised when it first appeared in the 1930s, neglected for decades and reissued to wide acclaim in the 1960s, has been hailed, finally, as the finest Jewish-American novel of the first half of the century and one of the richest modernist novels to appear in America. The introduction by Hana Wirth-Nesher locates the novel in its cultural context and in terms of contemporary debates about ethnic literature, minority writing, and the problem of representativeness. Thus, the volume sets out to consider Roth's hybrid status - as an American writer, a Jewish writer, and a European modernist.

New Essays on Rabbit Run
  • Edited by Stanley Trachtenberg
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    24 September 1993
  • Still John Updike's most popular and critically acclaimed novel, Rabbit Run introduced the character of Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, one of those middle-class Americans who, in Updike's words, aren't 'especially beautiful or bright or urban' but about whom there is a lot worth saying. The fallible hero struggles with his own sexuality, his religious feelings, the difficulties of being a son and father, and with the changes in American society that seem to suffocate him. Updike's writing is charged with narrative energy and pictorial accuracy that illuminate the present moment; it evokes the tension between the drab compromises we are forced to make with age and the religious mystery that sustains us. Written by a distinguished group of international scholars, these essays examine both the technical mastery and thematic range that make Updike's work one of the most significant achievements in modern American fiction and one that continues to provoke fresh critical insight.

New Essays on Go Tell It on the Mountain
  • Edited by Trudier Harris
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    29 March 1996
  • James Baldwin's first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, has gained a wide readership and much critical acclaim since its publication in 1953. While most critics have seen it as focusing exclusively on the African American fundamentalist church and its effect on characters brought up within its tradition, these scholars posit that issues of homosexuality, the social construction of identity, anthropological conceptions of community, and the quest for an artistic identity provide more elucidating approaches to the novel. Trudier Harris's introduction traces the history of its composition and the critical responses after its eventual publication; Michael F. Lynch re-evaluates the religious centre of the novel; Bryan R. Washington argues that the text has much to do with the uncovering of sexual identity; Vivian M. May uncovers the shifting identities throughout the work; and Keith Clark explores the quest of the characters for male communitas.

New Essays on Their Eyes Were Watching God
  • Edited by Michael Awkward
  • Published online:
    01 March 2011
    Print publication:
    25 January 1991
  • After decades of relegation to the margins of American literary history, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God has recently been rediscovered by American literary and cultural scholars who have begun to explore the novel's thematic, ideological, and aesthetic complexity. In the introduction to this volume Michael Awkward provides an overview of the critical reception of Hurston's novel, from the largely dismissive reviews accompanying the novel's publication in 1937, to factors which helped revive interest in Hurston in the 1960s, to its recent establishment as a central American novel. The other essays in the volume discuss Hurston's sophisticated use of black folklore, the autobiographical resonances in the novel, Hurston's definition of the relationship between black artists and the Afro-American masses, and the usefulness of feminist modes of inquiry. This collection offers fresh insight for approaching Hurston's compelling exploration of a black woman's extended search for self and community.

New Essays on 'The Portrait of a Lady'
  • Edited by Joel Porte
  • Published online:
    04 August 2010
    Print publication:
    26 January 1990
  • The Portrait of a Lady is arguably Henry James's most appealing and accessible novel. The introduction to this volume of specially written essays, first published in 1990, situates the novel in its cultural and historical context: its treatment of a modern woman 'affronting' her destiny, its relation to the contemporary controversy over 'morality' in fiction, its use of an Italian setting, and its late nineteenth century elegiac mood. It also discusses James's revisions of the novel and his late Preface. The essays that follow deal with the place of Portrait in the tradition of modern narrative, its relation to popular women's fiction on the question of marriage, the influence of James's 'family romance' and his brother William, and the character of Isabel Archer seen from a psychoanalytic point of view.

New Essays on The Sun Also Rises
  • Edited by Linda Wagner-Martin
  • Published online:
    06 July 2010
    Print publication:
    26 June 1987
  • The Sun Also Rises (1926) was Hemingway's first novel and is widely considered to be the most important of his longer works of fiction. Written in an accessible style by prominent scholars, this collection of essays provides helpful and valuable insight for general readers and Hemingway specialists alike. Each essay is devoted to a major aspect of the novel: Hemingway's use of humor, the literary and historical context of the book, the atypically prevalent character of Brett Ashley, and topical approaches to issues of sexuality in the novel.

New Essays on Song of Solomon
  • Edited by Valerie Smith
  • Published online:
    06 July 2010
    Print publication:
    27 January 1995
  • The essays collected in this volume, first published in 1995, are written by leading critics of Toni Morrison's work and exemplify the theoretical and cultural perspectives that have been brought to bear upon African American texts in general and upon Song of Solomon in particular. They reveal the complexities of a deceptively straightforward novel and spark renewed interest in what has proven a pivotal text by one of the most gifted authors this nation has produced.

New Essays on The American
  • Edited by Martha Banta
  • Published online:
    06 July 2010
    Print publication:
    26 June 1987
  • The American (1877) was written the very year Henry James committed himself to making his way as an author outside America. It thus formed part of the brief that James had to draw up both for and against his countrymen. This 1987 collection of essays casts light on this and other major aspects of the novel: the French literary influences on James as he gravitated between the genres of the romantic and the realistic novel; the many-layered French political scene that he incorporated into the novel; the complex gender roles of his characters; and the pervasive effect of capitalism upon them.

New Essays on Wise Blood
  • Edited by Michael Kreyling
  • Published online:
    26 January 2010
    Print publication:
    27 January 1995
  • This 1995 volume of critical essays on Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor's explosive first novel, not only questions our understanding of the 'Southern Gothic,' but launches an inquiry into the nature and history of O'Connor's critical reputation. Perceived as a 'classic' American writer despite the double setbacks of being a woman and a twentieth-century author, O'Connor continues to speak with striking clarity and disturbing vision to successive generations. Michael Kreyling's introduction explores the nature and history of O'Connor's literary reputation using quotations from her letters, works, and from critical reviews and articles covering the history of her presence in the canon. Robert Brinkmeyer Jr, who has written on O'Connor from a more or less traditional theological view in the past, writes a re-evaluative essay from that point of view. Patricia Yaeger's feminist/psychoanalytical essay explores the construction of the narrative voice in Wise Blood. James Mellard links O'Connor and Lacan, exploring territory that O'Connor herself found dangerous and irresistible: psychology and psychoanalysis. Jon Lance Bacon places O'Connor in the milieu of her times, American popular culture of the 1950s.

New Essays on Go Down, Moses
  • Edited by Linda Wagner-Martin
  • Published online:
    16 January 2010
    Print publication:
    13 June 1996
  • Go Down, Moses (1942) came to fruition during the Second World War, was written during one of Faulkner's most traumatic periods, and has fallen to critical neglect amid the vast scholarship on the great Southern writer. In part, this collection aims to tilt the balance, forcing the reader beyond critical commonplaces through asking challenging questions. The five essays assembled here explore the tensions of race and gender apparent throughout the novel. Judith Sensibar approaches the work through Faulkner's relationship with Caroline Barr, the black woman who was his primary caretaker in life; Judith Wittenberg offers an ecological reading; John T. Matthews redefines the novel as a 'Southern' experience; Minrose Gwin focuses on the spaces in the text occupied by black women characters; and Thadious M. Davis charts further complications of the black-white relationships that lie at the heart of the novel.

New Essays on The Crying of Lot 49
  • Edited by Patrick O'Donnell
  • Published online:
    12 January 2010
    Print publication:
    31 January 1992
  • Thomas Pynchon's novel, The Crying of Lot 49, is widely recognized as a significant contemporary work that frames the desire for meaning and the quest for knowledge within the social and political contexts of the fifties and sixties in America. In the introduction to this collection of original essays, Patrick O'Donnell discusses the background and critical reception of the novel. Further essays by five experts on contemporary literature examine: the novel's 'semiotic regime' or the way in which it organizes signs; the comparison of postmodernist Pynchon and the influential South American writer, Jorge Luis Borges; metaphor in the novel; the novel's narrative strategies; and the novel within the cultural contexts of American Puritanism and the Beat movement. Together, these essays provide an examination of the novel within its literary, historical, and scientific contexts.

New Essays on The Country of the Pointed Firs
  • Edited by June Howard
  • Published online:
    08 January 2010
    Print publication:
    27 May 1994
  • This is a collection of new essays on one of the most important works of New England local colour fiction, The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett. It builds on feminist literary scholarship that affirms the importance and value of Jewett's work, but goes beyond previously published studies by offering an analysis of how race, nationalism, and the literary marketplace shape her narrative. The volume constitutes a major rethinking of Jewett's contribution to American literature, and will be of broad interest to the fields of American literary studies, feminist cultural criticism, and American studies.

New Essays on The Rise of Silas Lapham
  • Edited by Donald E. Pease
  • Published online:
    08 January 2010
    Print publication:
    31 May 1991
  • The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) established William Dean Howells's reputation in the annals of American literature. This collection of essays, first published in 1991, argues the renewed importance of Howells's novel for an understanding of literature as a social force as well as a literary form. In his introduction Donald Pease recounts the fall and rise of the novel's value in literary history, outlines the various critical responses to Silas Lapham, and restores the novel to its social context. The essays that follow expand on this theme, challenging the accepted views of literary critics by explicating narrative methods and the genre of literary realism. Focusing much of its attention on economics of morality, manners, and pain, as well as the marketplace, the volume as a whole argues that a relationship exists between Howells's realism and its socioeconomic context.

New Essays on The Red Badge of Courage
  • Edited by Lee Clark Mitchell
  • Published online:
    08 January 2010
    Print publication:
    28 November 1986
  • First published in 1895, The Red Badge of Courage found immediate success and brought its author immediate fame. In his introduction to this volume, Lee Clark Mitchell discusses how Crane broke with the conventions of both fiction and journalism to create a uniquely 'disruptive' prose style. The five essays that follow each explore different aspects of the novel. One studies the problem of establishing the authentic text; another examines it as a war novel; a third considers it as a critique of the rising mood of militant imperialism in the 1890s; a fourth focuses on the double perspective of the novel - its shift between the hero's perspective and a larger, 'cosmic' one; and the final essay examines the novel's deconstruction of courage/cowardice. Written in a highly accessible style, these essays represent the best of recent scholarship and provide students with a useful introduction to this major novel.

New Essays on The Awakening
  • Edited by Wendy Martin
  • Published online:
    06 January 2010
    Print publication:
    29 July 1988
  • When The Awakening was first published in 1899 it was an extraordinarily controversial book. One of the first American novels to concern itself with themes of adultery and divorce, it was widely attacked as 'vulgar' and 'unhealthy'. In her introduction to this collection, Wendy Martin discusses the historical background of the novel and analyses the heroine's evolution from a role of traditional femininity to one of autonomous individualism. The essays that follow explore other central themes of the novel, as well as locating Chopin in the tradition of American women novelists and discussing her status as a pre-modernist writer.

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