The Cambridge Companion to American Novelists [Hardcover]

This volume provides newly commissioned essays from leading scholars and critics on the social and cultural history of the American novel.This volume provides newly commissioned essays from leading scholars and critics on the social and cultural history of the novel in America. It explores the work of the most influential American novelists of the past 200 years, including Melville, Twain, James, Wharton, Cather, Faulkner, Ellison, Pynchon, and Morrison.This volume provides newly commissioned essays from leading scholars and critics on the social and cultural history of the novel in America. It explores the work of the most influential American novelists of the past 200 years, including Melville, Twain, James, Wharton, Cather, Faulkner, Ellison, Pynchon, and Morrison.This Companion examines the full range and vigor of the American novel. From the American exceptionalism of James Fenimore Cooper to the apocalyptic post-Americanism of Cormac McCarthy, these newly commissioned essays from leading scholars and critics chronicle the major aesthetic innovations that have shaped the American novel over the past two centuries. The essays evaluate the work, life, and legacy of influential American novelists including Melville, Twain, James, Wharton, Cather, Faulkner, Ellison, Pynchon, and Morrison, while situating them within the context of their literary predecessors and successors. The volume also highlights less familiar, though equally significant writers such as Theodore Dreiser and Djuna Barnes, providing a balanced and wide-ranging survey of use to students, teachers, and general readers of American literature.Introduction Timothy Parrish; 1. James Fenimore Cooper Stephen Railton; 2. Nathaniel Hawthorne Robert Milder; 3. Herman Melville Clark Davis; 4. Harriet Beecher Stowe Arthur Riss; 5. Mark Twain Peter Messent; 6. Henry James Thomas J. Otten; 7. Edith Wharton Pamela Knights; 8. Theodore Dreiser Clare Eby; 9. Willa Cather Timothy Parrish; 10. F. Scott Fitzgerald Rulc"