The American Novel and Its Tradition

Since the earliest days, writes Richard Chase in this classic study, the American novel, in its most original and characteristic form, has worked out its destiny and defined itself by incorporating an element of romance. In his detailed study of works by Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Henry James, Frank Norris, George Washington Cable, William Dean Howells, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner, Chase identifies and traces this tradition through two centuries of American literature.

The best novelists, he argues, have found uses for romance beyond the escapism, fantasy, and sentimentality often associated with it. Through romance, these writers mirror the extremes of American culture--the Puritan melodrama of good and evil, or the pastoral idyll inspired by the American wilderness.

Author: Richard Chase
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 05/01/1980
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.68lbs
Size: 7.94h x 5.21w x 0.63d
ISBN: 9780801823039

About the Author

Richard Chase, author of Quest for Myth, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman Reconsidered, and other books, was a member of the English department faculty at Columbia University until his death in 1962.

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