Truth's Ragged Edge: The Rise of the American Novel - Rilegato

Gura, Philip F.

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0809094452 ISBN 13: 9780809094455

Casa editrice: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2013

Riassunto

From the acclaimed cultural historian Philip F. Gura comes Truth's Ragged Edge, a comprehensive and original history of the American novel's first century. Grounded in Gura's extensive consideration of the diverse range of important early novels, not just those that remain widely read today, this book recovers many long-neglected but influential writers--such as the escaped slave Harriet Jacobs, the free black Philadelphian Frank J. Webb, and the irrepressible John Neal--to paint a complete and authoritative portrait of the era. Gura also gives us the key to understanding what sets the early novel apart, arguing that it is distinguished by its roots in "the fundamental religiosity of American life." Our nation's pioneering novelists, it turns out, wrote less in the service of art than of morality.

This history begins with a series of firsts: the very first American novel, William Hill Brown'sThe Power of Sympathy, published in 1789; the first bestsellers, Susanna Rowson'sCharlotte Temple and Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette, novels that were, like Brown's, cautionary tales of seduction and betrayal; and the first native genre, religious tracts, which were parables intended to instruct the Christian reader. Gura shows that the novel did not leave behind its proselytizing purpose, even as it evolved. We see Catharine Maria Sedgwick in the 1820s conceiving ofA New-England Tale as a critique of Puritanism's harsh strictures, as well as novelists pushing secular causes: George Lippard'sThe Quaker City, from 1844, was a dark warning about growing social inequality. In the next decade certain writers--Hawthorne and Melville most famously--began to depict interiority and doubt, and in doing so nurtured a broader cultural shift, from social concern to individualism, from faith in a distant god to faith in the self.

Rich in subplots and detail, Gura's narrative includes enlightening discussions of the technologies that modernized publishing and allowed for the printing of novels on a mass scale, and of the lively cultural journals and literary salons of early nineteenth-century New York and Boston. A book for the reader of history no less than the reader of fiction,Truth's Ragged Edge--the title drawn from a phrase in Melville, about the ambiguity of truth--is an indispensable guide to the fascinating, unexpected origins of the American novel.

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Recensione

An enthralling work of literary recovery . . . If you think that academics now only write for each other, this book will come as a revelation . . . In his acknowledgments, Gura writes that his book was partly inspired by Edmund Wilson's magisterial Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War. Future scholars will be comparably inspired by Truth's Ragged Edge.--Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Gura provides a long-awaited new map of American fiction.--The American Scholar Literary criticism on a grand scale.--Harvard Magazine. Those who agree with Hemingway's claim that Huckleberry Finn created all modern American fiction will find this study of our pre-Twain literary tradition illuminating . . . Gura tempers this book's thrill of discovery over forgotten voices and stories with a still-relevant warning that the fearless individualism of American fiction can come dangerously close to solipsism.--Publishers Weekly. Philip F. Gura has written the most ambitious, most comprehensive study ever attempted of American fiction from its beginnings to 1868. You will find here some novelists you've never heard of alongside old friends such as Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville. By looking at novels thematically, and in the light of American religious history, Gura has produced a profoundly new kind of literary history, one linked beyond dispute to American theological concerns and American religious life. This book will change the way you look at the American novel. A grand achievement.--Robert D. Richardson, Bancroft Prize-winning author of William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism. Updated literary history at its very best. By assimilating recent rediscoveries of Afro-American and women's fictions--and adding new insights and new titles of his own. --Various

L'autore

Philip F. Gura is the William S. Newman Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author ofAmerican Transcendentalism: A History, which was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction, as well as many other books of American cultural history.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Data di pubblicazione: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0809094452
• ISBN 13: 9780809094455
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 330