Reading the American Novel 1920-2010

by James Phelan

Overview

Reading the Twentieth-Century American Novel, 1920-2010 is an instructive and insightful companion for students and scholars of American literature. It situates the American novel within the broader social, political, and artistic history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and equips its readers with key tools of rhetorical analysis that will enhance their capacities to respond to the remarkable diversity of the novel throughout this period. James Phelan’s survey keeps its eye on the historical trajectory of the genre, even as it considers each individual novel’s responses to specific aspects of its historical moment. In addition, Phelan engages in various productive cross-novel comparisons and contrasts with regard to such matters as the uses of unreliable narration, strategies for beginning and ending, and adaptations of the Bildungsroman.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781118512890
Publisher:	Wiley
Publication date:	04/02/2013
Series:	Reading the Novel
Sold by:	JOHN WILEY & SONS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	280
File size:	433 KB

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

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"In these fine rhetorical readings of novels by Hurston, Faulkner, Nabokov, Morrison and others, James Phelan offers a capacious view of the development of the American novel from the twentieth century to the twenty-first.  With characteristic clarity and precision, Phelan considers the many ways in which imaginative vision and acts of reading coalesce as they reflect the experience of living in the modern world.  This is an essential contribution to the understanding of the American novel in our time."—Patrick O’Donnell, Michigan State University

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