This astute guide to the literary achievements of American novelists in the twentieth century places their work in its historical context and offers detailed analyses of landmark novels based on a clearly laid out set of tools for analyzing narrative form. * Includes a valuable overview of twentieth- and early twenty-first century American literary history * Provides analyses of numerous core texts including The Great Gatsby, Invisible Man, The Sound and the Fury, The Crying of Lot 49 and Freedom * Relates these individual novels to the broader artistic movements of modernism and postmodernism * Explains and applies key principles of rhetorical reading * Includes numerous cross-novel comparisons and contrasts

InhaltsangabeAcknowledgments vii Introduction: Reading the American Novel, 1920-2010 1 1 Principles of Rhetorical Reading 23 2 The Age of Innocence (1920): Bildung and the Ethics of Desire 39 3 The Great Gatsby (1925): Character Narration, Temporal Order, and Tragedy 61 4 A Farewell to Arms (1929): Bildung, Tragedy, and the Rhetoric of Voice 85 5 The Sound and the Fury (1929): Portrait Narrative as Tragedy 105 6 Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937): Bildung and the Rhetoric and Politics of Voice 127 7 Invisible Man (1952): Bildung, Politics, and Rhetorical Design 149 8 Lolita (1955): The Ethics of the Telling and the Ethics of the Told 171 9 The Crying of Lot 49 (1966): Mimetic Protagonist, ThematicSynthetic Storyworld 193 10 Beloved (1987): Sethe's Choice and Morrison's Ethical Challenge 213 11 Freedom (2010): Realism after Postmodernism 237 Index 261

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