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The Form of American Romance
About this book
Originally published in 1988. Edgar Dryden challenges recent criticism that has tended to discreditāor at least devalueāthe 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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Information
Table of contents
- Cover Page
- Copyright Page
- Title Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Abbreviations Used in the Text
- 1. The Thematics of a Form: Waverley and American Romance
- 2. The Limits of Romance: A Reading of The Marble Faun
- 3. The Entangled Text: Pierre and the Romance of Reading
- 4. The Image in the Mirror: Jamesās Portrait and the Economy of Romance
- 5. Faulkner and the Sepulcher of Romance: The Voices of Absalom, Absalom!
- 6. The Romance of the Word: John Barthās Letters
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Index
- About the Author