The American Novel

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 revol

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t is formulated feeling, not sociological or psychological theory; its aim is, as Professor Daiches declared, simply the aim of all literature, and for that matter of all art. (Langer 287). The novel, in other words, unlike the lyric poem, can amplify and contain complexities of thought and action (and emotion!) whose real impact may be concealed until the very end, either from characters or from reader or, occasionally, from both--a point to which we shall return shortly. The novelist conceives an artistic shape to which he may remain faithful, but the structure of that shape, however well conceived, may not be apparent. It becomes the aesthetic task, therefore, to use the medium of language to argue toward the resolution and clarification of that shape. This is a process of reason to which the extended narrative is uniquely suited. Indeed, the novel is an art form that may serve as a critique of reason, where excessive reason implies psychological deformity or where it is otherwise deceptive. It may also serve as the flashpoint for other reasoned discourse. And it may do both at the same time. One obvious illustration of this point is the novel that employs an unreliable narrator. In such a story, the writer manipulat
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Approximate Word count = 2630
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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