The Dream of the Great American Novel Hardcover – February 10, 2014

*Starred Review* In 1868, novelist John De Forest plucked the phrase “Great American Novel” from advertising chaff and made it an artistic challenge. Almost 150 years later, Buell assesses the entire trajectory of American fiction against the GAN aspiration. Cutting through the quixotic pretensions it has incubated, Buell discerns four substantive GAN templates. Hawthorne’s singular masterpiece of individual passion repressed yet intensified by communal morality, The Scarlet Letter defines the first template, exploited by Howells, Updike, and Mukherjee. The second GAN template emerges in novels of social ascent and self-invention, including Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby, Cather’s Song of the Lark, and James’ Portrait of a Lady. Typifying a third template, Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! probe fissures—regional, racial, economic, and sexual—in the American fabric. Buell’s fourth template finds illustrations in Melville’s Moby Dick, Dos Passos’ U.S.A., and Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, works reflecting the often-unstable collective that is American democracy. Rich in critical insight, Buell’s analysis locates scores of novels in its interpretive mosaic. And even in a conclusion suggesting that America’s global decline dims the prospects for its realization, Buell wonders if the GAN isn’t stirring again in surprising new developments in science fiction. An impressively ambitious literary survey. --Bryce Christensen

Magisterial… Buell’s magnum opus… Buell can summarize an argument or a plot with eye-opening precision―and make you suddenly see new things in familiar books… The grateful audience for this book will be other scholars and teachers of American literature, who will plunder its pages for decades to come. And plunder it they will because, all cavils aside, Buell proffers brilliant analyses of a dozen or so front-runners in the Great American Novel sweepstakes. (Michael Dirda Virginia Quarterly Review 2014-01-01)

Anyone reading it will learn a great deal about the state and the study of our national literature. (Michael Gorra Wall Street Journal 2014-02-08)

Lawrence Buell…deserves congratulations for taking on this broad and controversial subject… Whether it survives or has ever existed, the GAN is really just a critical peg on which Buell hangs some fine analyses of canonical American novels. (Elaine Showalter Prospect 2014-03-01)

Rich in critical insight, Buell’s analysis locates scores of novels in its interpretive mosaic. And even in a conclusion suggesting that America’s global decline dims the prospects for its realization, Buell wonders if the [Great American Novel] isn’t stirring again in surprising new developments in science fiction. An impressively ambitious literary survey. (Bryce Christensen Booklist (starred review) 2014-01-01)

Although readers will encounter many usually canonized suspects, Buell’s scope is wide enough to encompass the varieties of novelists’ imaginations and to consider the implications of multiculturalism and globalism in redefining the future of American fiction. (Kirkus Reviews 2013-11-01)

Impressive in scope, erudition, and detail…Buell sees well beyond the canonical Great White Males and perceives American studies as a properly ‘transnational’ and ‘transpacific’ profession. Buell’s engaging book should itself become a landmark of American studies, as it exemplifies precisely why great literature needs to be read and taught. (Publishers Weekly 2013-11-11)

Wide-ranging and astute, Lawrence Buell’s literary history revolves around an unkillable dream, around scripts that make some texts institutions. (Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University)

Lawrence Buell has read and mastered every novel you can think of and many you have never heard of. One result, among many others, is the definitive study of a concept so tenacious―and so caught between idea, claim, sham, and belief―that no major writer in the culture has ever been able to avoid it. The idea of The Great American Novel has been capitalized in fame, shame, and ridicule over the years, but no one before Buell has given it the full understanding it deserves. This book marvelously captures the compulsive but ever-changing communal needs that have made the idea of America a fictional playground for every writer and reader in the nation. (Robert A. Ferguson, author of Alone in America: The Stories that Matter)

Demonstrating an enviable command of the full sweep of modern literary history, but also an expert eye for the telling individual case, Buell’s analysis of the dream of the Great American Novel is itself a great work of Americanist literary criticism, brilliantly faithful both to the anachronism and the continuing urgency of the idea at its heart. One comes away from this highly readable book with a new understanding of how certain works of literature have made themselves matter to American readers and, what’s more, an exquisitely balanced sense of the prospects for the novel’s future as an expression of national identity―and national discord. (Mark McGurl, Stanford University)

As I read this book I was excited by the unexpectedness, even brilliance of many of its commentaries. This is an important work that every scholar of American literature and many who are not, will want to read. It redefines the concept of the Great American Novel and rethinks the nature of the canonical for our contemporary critical times. (Peter Messent Times Higher Education 2014-02-27)