Contents

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents vii
3. Abbreviations xi
4. Introduction 1
5. PART ONE THE UNKILLABLE DREAM
6. 1. Birth, Heyday, and Seeming Decline 23
7. 2. Reborn from the Critical Ashes 46
8. PART TWO. SCRIPT ONE: MADE CLASSIC BY RETELLING
9. 3. The Reluctant Master Text 71
10. PART THREE. SCRIPT TWO: ASPIRATION IN AMERICA
11. Introduction 105
12. 4. “Success” Stories from Franklin to the Dawn of Modernism 109
13. 5. Belated Ascendancy: Fitzgerald to Faulkner, Dreiser to Wright and Bellow 139
14. 6. Up- From Narrative in Hyphenated America: Ellison, Roth, and Beyond 175
15. PART FOUR. SCRIPT THREE: ROMANCING THE DIVIDES
16. Introduction 217
17. 7. Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Its Aftermaths 226
18. 8. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Its Others 258
19. 9. Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, and Literary Interracialism North and South 286
20. 10. Morrison’s Beloved as Culmination and Augury 317
21. PART FIVE. SCRIPT FOUR: IMPROBABLE COMMUNITIES
22. Introduction 349
23. 11. Moby- Dick: From Oblivion to Great American Novel 358
24. 12. The Great American Novel of Twentieth- Century Breakdown: Dos Passos’s U.S.A.— or Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath? 389
25. 13. Late Twentieth- Century Maximalism: Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow— and Its Rainbow 423
26. Epilogue 461
27. Notes 467
28. Acknowledgments 539
29. Index 541