The American Vision: Actual and Ideal Society in Nineteenth-Century Fiction.

Abstract

Four of the major novelists of the past century are reinterpreted in terms of their approach to the society of their time. Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain are shown to have accepted the American social order, though not without a critical evaluation of it. At the same time, each in his own way projected the image of an ideal society. The common theme of the actual and ideal is seen in two perspectives. On the one hand, the book analyses the society in relation to an underlying cultural tradition, which was, the author finds, extraordinarily active in the nineteenth-century fiction. On the other hand, it considers the shaping influence of the theme on the craft of fiction.