The Last Great American Tragedy

As dictated in Plato's Symposium, Zeus separated humans out of fear, damning them to a life of searching, leaving them with a glimmer of hope, a memory, a longing for their original other half. Cordelia, an esteemed author, meets her other half under the most unusual circumstances. Grieving her mother's death, she moves to the sleepy little city of Asheville to end her life. After a near successful drowning attempt, Doctor Locke saves her, thus starting a love affair that rivals the gods. Both broken and troubled, the two hearts dance around each other in a shifting battle of willpower. But as Cordelia starts exhibiting the telltale signs of a body fading away, will the good doctor be able to keep her soul attached to this mortal coil, or will she force him to walk his life alone, never to be complete?

Ambitious, but ill-educated, naïve, and immature, Clyde Griffiths is raised by poor and devoutly religious parents to help in their street missionary work. As a young adult, Clyde must, to help support his family, take menial jobs as a soda jerk, then a bellhop at a prestigious Kansas City hotel. There, his more sophisticated colleagues introduce him to bouts of social drinking and sex with prostitutes. Enjoying his new lifestyle, Clyde becomes infatuated with manipulative Hortense Briggs, who takes advantage of him. After being in a car accident in which a young girl loses her life, Clyde is forced to run away from the town in search for the new life.

This book's premise is that a novel's ideas about the human drama are not necessarily the same as those its author consciously holds - meaning that a close reading of Theodore Dreiser's artistic portrayal of modern America in An American Tragedy reveals the idea that he transcends the empirical premises of his presumed naturalistic thought to affirm the reality of the self and the importance of selfhood. Based on this crucial premise and intensive analysis of the novel's text, Professor Orlov's study develops an argument offering many original views of the Tragedy's meanings and artistry. There is new light here on the fact that Dreiser sees the subversion of the idea of self in a highly materialistic society as the heart of his characters' tragic experiences. Ultimately, then, this study suggests that An American Tragedy is an antinaturalistic statement about the self's intrinsic importance.

“Magisterial . . . make[s] you suddenly see new things in familiar books . . . brilliant analyses of a dozen or so front-runners in the Great American Novel sweepstakes.” —Michael Dirda, Virginia Quarterly Review The idea of “the great American novel” continues to thrive almost as vigorously as in its nineteenth-century heyday, defying more than 150 years of attempts to dismiss it as amateurish or obsolete. In this landmark book, the first in many years to take in the whole sweep of national fiction, Lawrence Buell reanimates this supposedly antiquated idea, demonstrating that its history is a key to the dynamics of national literature and national identity itself. The dream of the G.A.N., as Henry James nicknamed it, crystallized soon after the Civil War. In fresh, in-depth readings of selected contenders from the 1850s onward in conversation with hundreds of other novels, Buell delineates four “scripts” for G.A.N. candidates and their themes, illustrated by such titles as The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, Invisible Man, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Beloved, Moby-Dick, and Gravity’s Rainbow—works dwelling on topics from self-invention to the promise and pitfalls of democracy. The canvas of the great American novel is in constant motion, reflecting revolutions in fictional fashion, the changing face of authorship, and the inseparability of high culture from popular. As Buell reveals, the elusive G.A.N. showcases the myth of the United States as a nation perpetually under construction. “Engaging and provocative . . . ultimately affirms the importance of literature to a nation’s sense of itself.” —Sarah Graham, Times Literary Supplement “Rich in critical insight . . . Buell wonders if the GAN isn’t stirring again in surprising new developments in science fiction. An impressively ambitious literary survey.” —Booklist (starred review)

A re-creation of the deliberations, actions, and deceptions that brought two decades of post-World War II confidence to an end, this book offers an insight into the Vietnam War at home and abroad - and into American foreign policy in the 1960s.

A powerful critique of the revolutionary mentality and sexual aggression represented in the works of authors including D. H. Lawrence, Georges Bataille, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer.

This book represents the first comparative reading of the Great Novel of American and Arabic literature to date. The Great American Novel, that most elusive and frustrating of concepts, ever-present in film and literary scholarship, has been an object of pursuit, inspiration and contention for more than a century. By reviewing the most serious literary scholarship in the field, this book identifies the work often recognized by critics as the quintessential American novel, the work that best captures the different aspects of American society, and compares and contrasts it with its counterpart in Arabic culture. Intended for both academics and serious readers of literature, the book serves to establish a new trend in cross-cultural literary scholarship, in addition to opening up new vistas for literary exploration in this politically charged field.

A brilliant, far-reaching collection of stories from Washington Irving to John Updike. The Classic Stories Edgar Allan Poe’s Ms. Found in a Bottle Bret Harte’s The Outcasts of Poker Flat Sherwood Anderson’s Death in the Woods Stephen Vincent Benét’s By the Waters of Babylon The Great Writers Melville James Dreiser Faulkner Hemingway Steinbeck McCullers The Little-Known Masterpieces Edith Wharton’s The Dilettante Finley Peter Dunne’s Mr. Dooley on the Popularity of Fireman Charles M. Flandrau’s A Dead Issue James Reid Parker’s The Archimandrite’s Niece