Truth's Ragged Edge: The Rise of the American Novel - Couverture rigide

An enthralling work of literary recovery . . . If you think that academics now only write for each other, this book will come as a revelation . . . In his acknowledgments, Gura writes that his book was partly inspired by Edmund Wilson's magisterial Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War. Future scholars will be comparably inspired by Truth's Ragged Edge.--Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Gura provides a long-awaited new map of American fiction.--The American Scholar Literary criticism on a grand scale.--Harvard Magazine. Those who agree with Hemingway's claim that Huckleberry Finn created all modern American fiction will find this study of our pre-Twain literary tradition illuminating . . . Gura tempers this book's thrill of discovery over forgotten voices and stories with a still-relevant warning that the fearless individualism of American fiction can come dangerously close to solipsism.--Publishers Weekly. Philip F. Gura has written the most ambitious, most comprehensive study ever attempted of American fiction from its beginnings to 1868. You will find here some novelists you've never heard of alongside old friends such as Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville. By looking at novels thematically, and in the light of American religious history, Gura has produced a profoundly new kind of literary history, one linked beyond dispute to American theological concerns and American religious life. This book will change the way you look at the American novel. A grand achievement.--Robert D. Richardson, Bancroft Prize-winning author of William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism. Updated literary history at its very best. By assimilating recent rediscoveries of Afro-American and women's fictions--and adding new insights and new titles of his own. --Various

Philip F. Gura's Truth's Ragged Edge is perhaps the first comprehensive study of the early American novel since Richard Chase's 1957 classic, The American Novel and Its Tradition. Gura opens with the first truly home-grown genre of fiction: religious tracts, short parables intended to instruct the Christian reader. He then turns to the city novels of the 1840s, which depicted with mixed feelings the rapid growth and modernization of American society. He concludes with fresh interpretations of the introspective novels that appeared before the Civil War, such as those by Hawthorne and by Melville, from whom Gura takes his title. The grand narrative sweep of the book is balanced by Gura's great insight that the early novel never fully left its origins behind, even as it evolved - it remained a means of theological and philosophical dispute, and reflected the oldest and deepest divisions in American Christianity, politics, and culture. In addition to discussing novels that are considered classics, Gura recovers many novels - by authors as diverse as the evangelical writer Susan Warner, the African American novelist Frank J. Webb, and the early feminist novelist Elizabeth Stoddard - that will be revelations to the contemporary reader. Panoramic and original, Truth's Ragged Edge is an indispensable guide to the origins and development of the American novel and will become a standard book on its subject.