The Modern American Novel

Front Cover
Viking, 1993 - Fiction - 329 pages
"Beginning with the 1890s and the seminal novels of Henry James and Theodore Dreiser, this highly acclaimed volume charts the flowering of the American narrative tradition. It takes in Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner; the emergence of Jewish and African-American literatures; and the works of Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, and Kurt Vonnegut. Updated to consider the most important fiction of the 1980s and early '90s, The Modern American Novel is a comprehensive critical history of American literary achievement."--Quatrième de couverture.

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Contents

The 1890s
1
19001912
25
19121920
51
Copyright

7 other sections not shown

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About the author (1993)

A professor of English literature and American studies who has published numerous critical works, Malcolm Bradbury is also a novelist whose protagonists are academics who make muddles of their personal and professional lives. He maintains that his main concern is to explore problems and dilemmas of liberalism and issues of moral responsibility. The targets of Bradbury's satires include intellectual pretension, cultural myopia, and official smugness. His protagonists are largely sympathetic, if comic, failures at mastering their own fates in a world of absurd rules and regulations. His major novels include Eating People Is Wrong (1959), Stepping Westward (1965), and The History Man (1975). This last, a novel of intellectual and political conflict at an English university in the late 1960s, was made into a successful television minidrama. More recent novels include Rates of Exchange (1983) and Cuts (1987).

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