The Anti Hero In The American Novel

The Anti-Hero in the American Novel rereads major texts of the 1960s to offer an innovative re-evaluation of a set of canonical novels that moves beyond entrenched post-modern and post-structural interpretations towards an appraisal which emphasizes the specifically humanist and idealist elements of these works.

Philippe Codde provides a comparative cultural analysis of the unprecedented success of the Jewish novel in the postwar United States by situating the process and event in the context of three closely-related American cultural movements: the popularity in the US of French philosophical and literary existentialism, the increasing visibility of the Holocaust in US-American life, and the advent of radical theology. Codde argues that the literary repertoire of the postwar Jewish novel consists of an amalgam of these cultural elements that were making their mark in the political, religious, and philosophical systems of the United States at the time, and that this explains, in part, the Jewish novel's sweeping success in the American literary system.

In song, verse, narrative, and dramatic form, war literature has existed for nearly all of recorded history. Accounts of war continue to occupy American bestseller lists and the stacks of American libraries. This innovative work establishes the American novel of war as its own sub-genre within American war literature, creating standards by which such works can be classified and critically and popularly analyzed. Each chapter identifies a defining characteristic, analyzes existing criticism, and explores the characteristic in American war novels of record. Topics include violence, war rhetoric, the death of noncombatants, and terrain as an enemy.

American Fiction in Transition is a study of the observer-hero narrative, a highly significant but critically neglected genre of the American novel. Through the lens of this transitional genre, the book explores the 1990s in relation to debates about the end of postmodernism, and connects the decade to other transitional periods in US literature. Novels by four major contemporary writers are examined: Philip Roth, Paul Auster, E. L. Doctorow and Jeffrey Eugenides. Each novel has a similar structure: an observer-narrator tells the story of an important person in his life who has died. But each story is equally about the struggle to tell the story, to find adequate means to narrate the transitional quality of the hero's life. In playing out this narrative struggle, each novel thereby addresses the broader problem of historical transition, a problem that marks the legacy of the postmodern era in American literature and culture.

Focusing on American fiction from 1850-1940, Narrating Class in American Fiction offers close readings in the context of literary and political history to detail the uneasy attention American authors gave to class in their production of social identities.

The Routledge Introduction to the American Novel provides a comprehensive and engaging guide to this cornerstone literary genre, reframing our understanding of the American novel and its evolving traditions. This volume aims to engage productive classroom discussion, including: What differentiates the American novel from its European predecessors and traditions from other parts of the world? How have the related myths of the American Dream and the Great American Novel affected understanding of the tradition over time? How do American novels by or about women, racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, and members of lower social classes challenge the American cultural monomyth? How do experimental novels and eco-conscious novels alter the American novel tradition? Rethinking historical trends and debates surrounding the American novel, this text delivers a persuasive case for why it’s important to reevaluate the American novelistic tradition. The Routledge Introduction to the American Novel offers a much-needed update to the history and future of this literary form.

This handbook offers students and researchers a compact introduction to the nineteenth-century American novel in the light of current debates, theoretical concepts, and critical methodologies. The volume turns to the nineteenth century as a formative era in American literary history, a time that saw both the rise of the novel as a genre, and the emergence of an independent, confident American culture. A broad range of concise essays by European and American scholars demonstrates how some of America‘s most well-known and influential novels responded to and participated in the radical transformations that characterized American culture between the early republic and the age of imperial expansion. Part I consists of 7 systematic essays on key historical and critical frameworks ― including debates aboutrace and citizenship, transnationalism, environmentalism and print culture, as well as sentimentalism, romance and the gothic, realism and naturalism. Part II provides 22 essays on individual novels, each combining an introduction to relevant cultural contexts with a fresh close reading and the discussion of critical perspectives shaped by literary and cultural theory.