The Form of American Romance
eBook - ePub

The Form of American Romance

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

The Form of American Romance

About this book

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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Yes, you can access The Form of American Romance by Edgar Dryden in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & North American Literary Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover Page
  2. Copyright Page
  3. Title Page
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. Preface
  7. Abbreviations Used in the Text
  8. 1. The Thematics of a Form: Waverley and American Romance
  9. 2. The Limits of Romance: A Reading of The Marble Faun
  10. 3. The Entangled Text: Pierre and the Romance of Reading
  11. 4. The Image in the Mirror: James’s Portrait and the Economy of Romance
  12. 5. Faulkner and the Sepulcher of Romance: The Voices of Absalom, Absalom!
  13. 6. The Romance of the Word: John Barth’s Letters
  14. Conclusion
  15. Notes
  16. Index
  17. About the Author