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 historyProvides analyses of numerous core texts includingThe Great Gatsby, Invisible Man, The Sound and the Fury, The Crying of Lot 49 andFreedomRelates these individual novels to the broader artistic movements of modernism and postmodernismExplains and applies key principles of rhetorical readingIncludes numerous cross-novel comparisons and contrasts

James Phelan is Distinguished University Professor in the Department of English at Ohio State University, USA. His wide-ranging research in narrative theory includes influential studies of literary character, narrative progression, unreliable narration, and the ethics of reading as well as significant fresh interpretations of numerous twentieth-century American and British novels and short stories. The editor ofNarrative, the journalInternational Society for the Study of Narrative, Prof Phelan is also a prolific author and editor whose credits include the prize-winningLiving to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration (2005), theBlackwell Companion to Narrative Theory (2005) and the collaboratively writtenNarrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates (2012).

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Reading the American Novel, 19202010 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): Sethes Choice and Morrisons Ethical Challenge 213

11 Freedom (2010): Realism after Postmodernism 237

Index 261