Description
Book SynopsisOriginally published in 1988. Edgar Dryden challenges recent criticism that has tended to discreditor at least devaluethe 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.
Trade ReviewDryden augments his own imaginative insights with concepts drawn from Derrida, Barthes, and Ortega y Gasset to provide an original and illuminative treatment of the 'form' of the romance novel in American tradition.
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South Atlantic ReviewTable of ContentsPreface
Abbreviations Used in the Text
Chapter 1. The Thematics of a Form: Waverley and American Romance
Chapter 2. The Limits of Romance: A Reading of The Marble Faun
Chapter 3. The Entangled Text: Pierre and the Romance of Reading
Chapter 4. The Image in the Mirror: James's Portrait and the Economy of Romance
Chapter 5. Faulkner and the Sepulcher of Romance: The Voices of Absalom, Absalom!
Chapter 6. The Romance of the Word: John Barth's LETTERS
Conclusion
Notes
Index
