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.

Book Information
ISBN 9781421431123
Author Edgar Dryden
Format Paperback
Page Count 274
Imprint Johns Hopkins University Press
Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press
Weight(grams) 386g