Reading the American Novel 1920-2010 / Edition 1

by James Phelan

Overview

This astute guide to the literary achievements of American novelists in the twentieth century places their work in its historical context and offers detailed analyses of landmark novels based on a clearly laid out set of tools for analyzing narrative form.

• Includes a valuable overview of twentieth- and early twenty-first century American literary history
• Provides analyses of numerous core texts including The Great Gatsby, Invisible Man, The Sound and the Fury, The Crying of Lot 49 and Freedom
• Relates these individual novels to the broader artistic movements of modernism and postmodernism
• Explains and applies key principles of rhetorical reading
• Includes numerous cross-novel comparisons and contrasts 

 

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780631230670
Publisher:	Wiley
Publication date:	06/10/2013
Series:	Reading the Novel
Pages:	278
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

James Phelan is Distinguished University Professor in the Department of English at Ohio State University, USA. His wide-ranging research in narrative theory includes influential studies of literary character, narrative progression, unreliable narration, and the ethics of reading as well as significant fresh interpretations of numerous twentieth-century American and British novels and short stories. The editor of Narrative, the journal International Society for the Study of Narrative, Prof Phelan is also a prolific author and editor whose credits include the prize-winning Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration (2005), the Blackwell Companion to Narrative Theory (2005) and the collaboratively written Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates (2012).

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Reading the American Novel, 1920–2010 1

1 Principles of Rhetorical Reading 23

2 The Age of Innocence (1920): Bildung and the Ethics of Desire 39

3 The Great Gatsby (1925): Character Narration, Temporal Order, and Tragedy 61

4 A Farewell to Arms (1929): Bildung, Tragedy, and the Rhetoric of Voice 85

5 The Sound and the Fury (1929): Portrait Narrative as Tragedy 105

6 Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937): Bildung and the Rhetoric and Politics of Voice 127

7 Invisible Man (1952): Bildung, Politics, and Rhetorical Design 149

8 Lolita (1955): The Ethics of the Telling and the Ethics of the Told 171

9 The Crying of Lot 49 (1966): Mimetic Protagonist,
Thematic–Synthetic Storyworld 193

10 Beloved (1987): Sethe’s Choice and Morrison’s Ethical Challenge 213

11 Freedom (2010): Realism after Postmodernism 237

Index 261

Editorial Reviews

It is an excellent book.”  (Primary Health Care,1 March 2015)

“Reading the American Novelis also a rich experience, both in terms of the novels discussed and in terms of their literary-critical examination.”  (Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas,13 January 2014)

 

From the Publisher