The Great American Novel: Final Chapter

Abstract

I HAVE DISCUSSED THE HISTORY OF THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL MIRAGE from its earliest mention to the present,' focusing on various critical and theoretical problems which involved literary nationalism, the opposition between universalist and localist, European and American, nationalist and regionalist emphases.2 Since my previous treatment of the subject was discursively centered in the 19th century, I wish now to address myself to the problkm of why and how the idea has been abandoned or debunked in the 20th century, citing representative writers and works on the way. Without having to review attempts to re-define the Great American Novel or the Great American Novelist, I will begin with a kind of transitional statement from a Howells novel and proceed immediately into the 20th century. I leave behind, therefore, characterizations of that Longinian avatar of American novelistic sublimity, that uniform hieroglyphic of fiction, that super-divine-average man-as-artist-and-American. I also leave further taxonomy of that grand amalgam or aggregate of regional moments and national epiphanies to languish in the penumbra of the 19th century. Under the aspect of eternity the northern, southern, western and generically American particularization as well as generalization become a critical cul-de-sac. Thus we hear William Dean Howells (Chap. 9, Part