Kooperativer Bibliotheksverbund

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Format: 1 online resource (256p.)

ISBN: 9780231511902

Content: In this provocative book, Anthony Hutchison challenges the belief that the American novel is "antipolitical" and condemns the relative absence of American literature in studies of the political novel. In Hutchison's view, our fiction is always informed by the complexities of the American political tradition, and to acknowledge this is to introduce a new, rewarding chapter of critical inquiry into the study of American literature.Focusing on the works of Herman Melville, Gore Vidal, Russell Banks, Lionel Trilling, and Philip Roth, Hutchison finds a critique of liberalism put forth by classical republicanism, transcendentalism, Marxism, and neoconservatism at their respective moments of historical ascent. He shows how these authors take very specific historical periods and episodes for their subject matter and interrogate, critique, and contextualize pivotal moments in the intellectual history of American liberalism. In their work, liberalism reconstitutes itself in the face of competing ideological pressures, demonstrating that the novel is very much characterized by a "republican" concern with the health of the polity.Considering such artists, philosophers, and theorists as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Hannah Arendt, and John Dewey, alongside numerous contemporary commentators and historians, Hutchison repositions American novelists as serious political thinkers. He reveals Melville's Moby Dick to be the formal template for the American political novel and compares and contrasts its embodiment of "republican" fiction with the "democratic" mode Mikhail Bakhtin associates with Dostoevsky. He especially d

Note: Frontmatter -- , CONTENTS -- , ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- , Introduction: Liberalism and the Problem of Tradition in American Literature -- , PART I. The Nineteenth-Century Context -- , 1. Elusive Republicanism: Thomas Jefferson and the Foundations of American Politics in Gore Vidal’s Burr -- , 2. “Our Divine Equality”: Russell Banks’s Cloudsplitter and the Redemptive Liberalism of the Lincoln Republic -- , PART II. The Twentieth-Century Context -- , 3. Ideas in Modulation: Marxism and Liberal Revaluation in Lionel Trilling’s The Middle of the Journey -- , 4. Liberalism Betrayed: Neoconservatism and the Postwar American Left in Philip Roth’s American Trilogy -- , Conclusion. Writing the Republic: Moby Dick and the Form of American Political Fiction -- , Notes -- , Bibliography -- , Index

Language: English

DOI: 10.7312/hutc14138

URL: https://doi.org/10.7312/hutc14138