The Dream of the Great American Novel - [Pure Main Title]

Sep 21, 2026

A scholarly study of “The Great American Novel” (GAN) idea and its critical trajectory across the 19th and 20th centuries. The work traces the dream’s origins, perceived decline, and reinvention through debates over American fiction’s national distinctiveness. It develops four “scripts” to analyze major authors and texts, from Hawthorne, Franklin-era narratives, Fitzgerald and Faulkner, to Stowe, Twain, Faulkner, Morrison, and Melville, examining how retelling and aspiration reshape literary social meaning.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLiterature

FormatPDF

Pages582

Reading Time14 h 56 min

AccessFree to download

Contents

Abbreviations

Introduction

The Plan of the Book

Just How "American" Is the GAN Idea?

Why Now?

PART ONE - THE UNKILL ABLE DREAM

1. Birth, Heyday, and Seeming Decline

2. Reborn from the Critical Ashes

PART TWO - SCRIPT ONE: MADE CLASSIC BY RETELLING

3. The Reluctant Master Text

PART THREE - SCRIPT TWO: ASPIRATION IN AMERICA

4. "Success" Stories from Franklin to the Dawn of Modernism

5. Belated Ascendancy

6. Up-From Narrative in Hyphenated America

PART FOUR - SCRIPT THREE: ROMANCING THE DIVIDES

7. Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Its Aftermaths

8. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Its Others

9. Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!

10. Morrison’s Beloved as Culmination and Augury

PART FIVE - SCRIPT FOUR: IMPROBABLE COMMUNITIES

11. Moby-Dick

12. The Great American Novel of Twentieth-Century Breakdown

13. Late Twentieth-Century Maximalism

Epilogue

THE DREAM OF THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL THE DREAM OF THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL 􀀂􀀃 LAWRENCE BUELL THE BELKNAP PRESS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2014 Copyright © 2014 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Page 539 constitutes an extension of the copyright page. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Buell, Lawrence. The dream of the great American novel / Lawrence Buell. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-05115-7 (alk. paper) 1. American ﬁction—19th century—History and criticism. 2. American ﬁction—20th century—History and criticism. 3. National characteristics, American, in literature. 4. Literature and society—United States—History—19th century. 5. Literature and society—United States—History—20th century. 6. United States—In literature. I. Title. PS377.B84 2014 813.009—dc23 2013032745 To my students at Harvard University and Oberlin College, from whom I’ve learned at least as much as I’ve taught Contents Abbreviations xi Introduction 1 The Plan of the Book 5 Just How “American” Is the GAN Idea? 10 Why Now? 14 PART ONE . THE UNKILL ABLE DREAM 1. Birth, Heyday, and Seeming Decline 23 The Birth of the Dream 24 Deﬁning the Terms, Somewhat 28 Monumentalism and Mockery: Dos Passos, Stein, and Others 36 2. Reborn from the Critical Ashes 46 Critical Professionalism and Paradigm Change 47 The Dream of the Great American Novel Miraculously Survives Its Discreditation 52 Chaos Conﬁgured? Morrison and Updike as Great American Novelists 60 PART TWO . SCRIPT ONE: MADE CLASSIC BY RETELLING 3. The Reluctant Master Text: The Making and Remakings of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter 71 Hawthorne as a Nonnational Writer 74 Provincial Discontent: Hawthorne’s Arts of Entrapment 76 Imagining Euro-Atlantic Diaspora: New England Derealized 84 Great American Novel Despite Itself: The Retellings 91 viii Contents PART THREE . SCRIPT TWO: ASPIRATION IN AMERICA Introduction. American Dreamers in Context 105 4. “Success” Stories from Franklin to the Dawn of Modernism 109 American Dilemma: Uneven Development of Early Fictions of Development 112 (Mis)Making Men: The Franklin Legend as Model and as Target 120 Women’s Up-From Stories: Antebellum to Wharton 129 5. Belated Ascendancy: Fitzgerald to Faulkner, Dreiser to Wright and Bellow 139 Double Helix: An American Tragedy and The Great Gatsby 141 Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Beyond: Americanization of Observer-Hero Narrative 151 Dreiser, Wright, Bellow, and the Ethnic Turn in Up-From Narrative 162 6. Up-From Narrative in Hyphenated America: Ellison, Roth, and Beyond 175 Ellison’s Invisible Man as Literary Event 176 Surpassing a Classic Benchmark: Invisible Man versus Huckleberry Finn 182 Ellison to Neo-slave Narrative and Beyond 192 Roth’s American Trilogy: American Pastoral as Success Story “Undone” 198 The Way We Live Now? 208 PART FOUR . SCRIPT THREE: ROMANCING THE DIVIDES Introduction. Shifting Ratios, Dangerous Proximities 217 7. Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Its Aftermaths 226 “The Greatest Book of Its Kind” 228 Self-Revision: Stowe’s Dred 240 North-South Divide Romances before and against Stowe 244 What Can Reform Fiction Do as Encore? Nineteenth-Century Novels after Stowe 248 8. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Its Others 258 Comedy as a Substitute for Politics 259 Unperceived Rivals: Cable’s The Grandissimes, Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition 275 Contents ix 9. Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, and Literary Interracialism North and South 286 Burning the House Down: Absalom, Absalom! 288 Recouping Tara: Gone with the Wind 300 Mirrors of Miscegenation for the Civil Rights Era and Beyond 308 10. Morrison’s Beloved as Culmination and Augury 317 Reinventing Tale

FAQs

What central idea does the book examine?

The book analyzes the “Great American Novel” (GAN) idea—how American fiction is imagined as a uniquely national form and how that claim is contested over time.

How is the book organized to study different writers and works?

It structures the analysis into parts and “scripts,” grouping themes such as retelling, aspiration, romanticizing divides, and improbable communities across major authors.

Which major authors and novels are discussed in the contents?

The table of contents names authors and works including Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Fitzgerald and Faulkner, Stowe and Twain, Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Morrison’s Beloved, and Melville’s Moby-Dick, among others.

Sep 21, 2026

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