The American Novel

Catalog description

The faces of the American novel are as various as the faces of the American people. A notoriously malleable genre, the novel has proven itself extraordinarily well suited to the task of depicting the multifarious and ever-changing social landscape of this vast nation, converting its chaos and contradictions into art.This course examines some of the most exemplary American novels, paying specialattention to the ways that these works explore, question, and rethink both what defines America and what defines a novel. To appreciate the variability of the American novel, students will study the genre in its adaptations across literarymovements—realism, naturalism, and modernism among them—with an eye towardunderstanding the relationship between the genre’s formal innovations and historicalchange.