Civil Wars: American Novelists and Manners, 1880-1940

ISBN-13: 9780801868245 / Angielski / Twarda / 2003 / 216 str.

Susan Goodman

Opis

Observers from Alexis de Tocqueville to Lionel Trilling have found the United States wanting in what it takes to produce a novelist of manners--namely, a rich enough past and sufficiently stratified classes. In a work that recovers the broader meaning of -manners- for past generations, Susan Goodman demonstrates that American writers have consistently tied the subject of national identity to the norms and behaviors of everyday life--that, in fact, the novel of manners is a dominant form of American fiction. Goodman concentrates on a cluster of writers--William Dean Howells, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow, and Jessie Fauset--whose analyses of manners offer several distinct social histories. Under her scrutiny, these writers' works allow us to view the creative interaction of individual lives, social dynamics, and historical legacies--what might be called the panorama of manners themselves--as well as the development of American fiction. Above all, Goodman shows that novels of manners are central to American literature, and that these novels speak in a large cultural way about who and what composes America.