The dream of the great American novel / Lawrence Buell.

Includes bibliographies and index.

Birth, heyday, and seeming decline -- Reborn from the critical ashes -- The reluctant master text: the making and remakings of Hawthorne's The scarlet letter -- American dreamers in context -- "Success" stories from Franklin to the dawn of modernism -- Belated ascendancy: Fitzgerald to Faulkner, Dreiser to Wright and Bellow -- Up-from narrative in hyphenated America: Ellison, Roth, and beyond -- Shifting ratios, dangerous proximities -- Uncle Tom's cabin and its aftermaths -- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and its others -- Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, Mitchell's Gone with the wind, and literary interracialism North and South -- Morrison's Beloved as culmination and augury -- Fatalisms of the multitude -- Melville's Moby-Dick: from oblivion to great American novel -- The great American novel of twentieth-century breakdown: Dos Passos's U.S.A.--or Steinbeck's Grapes of wrath? -- Late twentieth-century maximalism: Pynchon's Gravity's rainbow--and its rainbow.

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