The purpose of this research is to examine how the novel exemplifies the concepts that constitute the rational perspective better than other various artistic expressions, such as fugue, poem, painting, sculpture, and architectural style. The plan of the research will be to set forth the context in which the novel as the premiere expression of rational modes of being and action emerges, and then to discuss those elements of the novel that strengthen its standing as a representative of the rational.
Fiedler describes the unique position of the American novel in the American culture, citing its appearance in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries vis-a-vis the psychosocial and literary temper of the period. His principal point is to describe the philosophical and psychological content of the American novel in its formative stages, but he also implies a difference between the novel and lyric poetry as specific modes of artistic expression.
[T]he novel and America did not come into existence at the same time by accident. They are the two great inventions of the bourgeois, Protestant mind at the moment when it stood, on the one hand, between Rationalism and Sentimentalism, and on the other, between the drive for economic power and the need for cultural autonomy. The series of events which includes the American and the French Revolutions, the invention of the novel, the rise of modern psychology, and the triumph of the lyric in poetry, adds up to a psychic revolution as well as a social one. This revolution, viewed as an overturning of ideas and artistic forms, has traditionally been called "Romantic"; . . . It seems preferable to call the whole continuing, complex event simply "the Break-through," thus emphasizing the dramatic entry of a new voice into the dialogue of Western man with his various selves (Fiedler 32).
In other words, to express a new way of thinking, a new form of art was either required or inevi...