The Form of American Romance

<p>Edgar Dryden challenges recent criticism that has tended to discredit--or at least devalue--the importance of "romance" as a thematic and generic category of American fiction. In The Form of American Romance he examines its evolution and meaning through readings of five exemplary texts: Hawthorne's Marble Faun Melville's Pierre James's Portrait of a Lady Faulkner's Absalom Absalom! and Barth's Letters. Each of these novels treats the problems of reading and writing in a self-referential way that reflects on the questions they dramatize and Dryden has chosen each with the others in mind. Taken together they chart a line of development with representative examples of what literary history calls romanticism realism modernism and postmodernism and thus they suggest a certain story about the continuity of the American novel.</p>