The Form of American Romance

By Edgar Dryden and Professor Edgar Dryden

Book Overview

Edgar Dryden challenges recent criticism that has tended to discredit--or at least devalue--the 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1421431122
• ISBN13: 9781421431123
• Release Date: December 2019
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Length: 274 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher