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Cover image of The Form of American Romance
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The Form of American Romance

Edgar A. Dryden

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Originally published in 1988. 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...

Originally published in 1988. 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.

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Reviews

Dryden augments his own imaginative insights with concepts drawn from Derrida, Barthes, and Ortega y Gasset to provide an original and illuminative treatment of the 'form' of the romance novel in American tradition.

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Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x
9
Pages
274
ISBN
9781421431123
Table of Contents

Preface
Abbreviations Used in the Text
Chapter 1. The Thematics of a Form: Waverley and American Romance
Chapter 2. The Limits of Romance: A Reading of The Marble Faun
Chapter 3. The Entangled Text: P

Preface
Abbreviations Used in the Text
Chapter 1. The Thematics of a Form: Waverley and American Romance
Chapter 2. The Limits of Romance: A Reading of The Marble Faun
Chapter 3. The Entangled Text: Pierre and the Romance of Reading
Chapter 4. The Image in the Mirror: James's Portrait and the Economy of Romance
Chapter 5. Faulkner and the Sepulcher of Romance: The Voices of Absalom, Absalom!
Chapter 6. The Romance of the Word: John Barth's LETTERS
Conclusion
Notes
Index

Author Bio
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Edgar Dryden

Edgar A. Dryden is a professor emeritus of English at the University of Arizona. He also taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo.