A Companion to the American Novel

Preface xix

Acknowledgments xxi

A Chronology of the American Novel xxii

Part I: Historical Developments 1

1 The Development of the American Novel: The Transformations of Genre 3

Alfred Bendixen

2 The American Novel: Beginnings Through the American Renaissance 19

Maria Karafilis

3 The American Novel: Realism and Naturalism (1860–1920) 42

Jeanne Campbell Reesman

4 Modernism and the American Novel 60

Peter L. Hays

5 Beyond Modernism: The American Novel Between the World Wars 76

Alfred Bendixen

6 The Cold War Novel: The American Novel Between 1945–1970 90

Sharon Becker and Wendy Martin

7 The Novel in a Changing America: Multiculturalism and Other Issues (1970–Present) 109

Martha J. Cutter

Part II: Genres and Traditions 127

8 Fear, Ambiguity, and Transgression: The Gothic Novel in the United States 129

Charles L. Crow

9 The American Historical Romance: From James Fenimore Cooper and Nathaniel Hawthorne to Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, and E. L. Doctorow 147

Emily Miller Budick

10 Making This Whole Nation Feel: The Sentimental Novel in the United States 170

Marianne Noble

11 Social Protest, Reform, and the American Political Novel 187

Chip Rhodes

12 The American War Novel Tradition and the Individual Soldier 206

James H. Meredith

13 From the Sublime to the Ridiculous: Comic Traditions in the American Novel 218

Judith Yaross Lee

14 Plotting a Way Home: The Jewish American Novel 241

Derek Parker Royal

15 Chicano/a Traditions in the American Novel 259

Juan J. Alonzo

16 African American Traditions and the American Novel 274

Melvin Donalson

17 The American Novel of Mystery, Crime, and Detection 291

Leonard Cassuto

18 O Brave New Worlds: Science Fiction and the American Novel 309

Eric S. Rabkin

19 Dreaming of a White Future: Mary E. Bradley Lane, Edward Bellamy, and the Origins of the Utopian Novel in the United States 323

Jean Pfaelzer

20 Queer Theory and the American Novel 342

Deborah Carlin

21 The American Short-Story Cycle: Out From the Novel’s Shadow 357

Robert M. Luscher

Part III: Major Texts 373

22 The Woman’s Law in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter 375

Monika Elbert

23 Writ in Water: The Books of Melville’s Moby-Dick 394

Wyn Kelley

24 Wonder of Wonders: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin 408

Susan Belasco

25 Citational Strategies and Literary Traditions: Placing Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady 422

Greg W. Zacharias

26 Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Child’s Search for Comfort and Peace 443

Michael J. Kiskis

27 What Women Want: Kate Chopin’s The Awakening 454

Emily Toth

28 Private Fleming’s Various Battles: Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage 465

James Nagel

29 Lily’s Story: Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth 475

Kathy Fedorko

30 The Confessional Narration of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises 488

James Nagel

31 Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and the Myth of the Land 499

Richard Lehan

32 Ground Zero: Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury 510

Philip Weinstein

33 A Bigger Vision: Richard Wright’s Native Son and the Great American

Novel 525

Andrew Warnes

34 Our Invisible Man: The Aesthetic Genealogy of US Diversity 537

John Carlos Rowe

35 The Visionary Exuberance of Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March 554

Ben Siegel

36 The Flesh and the Word: Toni Morrison’s Beloved 570

Valerie Smith

37 A Different Kind of Love Story: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road 582

Olivia Carr Edenfield

Selected Readings in the Genres of the American Novel 598

Index 610