xii, 567 pages ; 25 cm

Includes bibliographical references (pages 467-537) and index

Birth, heyday, and seeming decline -- Reborn from the critical ashes -- The reluctant master text : the making and remakings of Hawthorne's The scarlet letter -- "Success" stories from Benjamin Franklin to the dawn of modernism -- Belated ascendancy : Fitzgerald to Faulkner, Dreiser to Wright and Bellow -- Up-from narrative in hyphenated America : Ellison, Roth, and beyond -- Uncle Tom's cabin and its aftermaths -- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and its others -- Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the wind, and literary interracialism North and South -- Toni Morrison's Beloved as culmination and augury -- Moby-Dick : from oblivion to great American novel -- The great American novel of early twentieth-century breakdown : Dos Passos's U.S.A. -- or Steinbeck's The grapes of wrath? -- Late twentieth-century maximalism : Pynchon's Gravity's rainbow -- and its rainbow

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