Great American Novel

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The term Great American Novel is a catchphrase often used in American literary discourse . It describes the ideal of a novel that should exemplarily depict the essence of the USA, i.e. the best American novel that has ever been written (or can be written).

The term was coined by the writer John William DeForest in the title of an essay that appeared in The Nation magazine on January 9, 1869 . Henry James shortened the term to the acronym GAN .

Discursive meaning

The concept of the Great American Novel is related to the romantic paradigm of national literature, i.e. the idea that the essence of a nation is exemplarily manifested in its literature. In the United States, the young republic's need for legitimation, especially vis-à-vis the motherland Great Britain, increased its efforts to appear as a cultural nation on a par with European nations. American literature should not imitate European literature, but deal with specifically American topics in a specifically American manner.

The competition between American and English literature was also fanned by frequent swipes by English authors. One sentence published in 1824 by Sydney Smith in the Edinburgh Review hurt the pride of the American literary scene particularly seriously :

" In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? (German: "Who is reading an American book in this big wide world?" ). "

On the other hand, American critics in the 19th century often complained that American literature had so far contributed little or nothing to " world literature ".

The fact that, of all literary genres, the novel was given the task of expressing the consecration of the nation is due, on the one hand, to the general increase in prestige that the novel also recorded in Europe, and the corresponding loss of importance of other forms such as the verse epic. On the other hand, the novel has always had a special reputation in the USA; American independence and the creation of the modern novel coincide.

The transfiguration of American writers reached a climax in the 1940s and 1950s following FO Matthessen's influential literary-historical work The American Renaissance (1941). The generation of Americanists that followed Matthiesen (especially Perry Miller , Henry Nash Smith , Charles Feidelson , Harry Levin , Leo Marx , Leslie Fiedler ) dedicated themselves to the task of naming what is specifically American in American literature. Since the 1970s, this approach has fallen into disrepute because of its ideological premises.

As early as 1850, the novel Onkel Toms Hütte was called "the greatest of American tales" by the publishing house. In the novel The Great American Novel , published in 1938, Clyde Brion Davis described the protagonist's efforts to write a corresponding work like a diary. The recipe for a GAN-compatible novel is therefore: One reflects the great social upheavals of the present in the microcosm of an American family.

Title contender

Regardless of all ideological criticism, the question of which novel is the Great American Novel or whether it has not yet been written is repeatedly asked in the American literary scene . Philip Roth parodied this game by publishing a novel called The Great American Novel in 1972 . Roth's novel is an ironic apotheosis of the game of baseball , a trivial yet classic American pastime.

The following novels have been proposed as contenders for the title of Best American Novel of All Time:

John Dos Passos ' novel trilogy USA (1930–36) can be understood as a deliberate attempt to claim the title of the Great American Novel - it is a broad moral picture of all American parts of the country and population strata.

In the opinion of Jan Wiele in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Norwegian author Johan Harstad with his novel Max, Mischa and the Tet Offensive should also be among the candidates if a European comes into question as the author of the Great American Novel .

literature

  • Lawrence Buell: The Dream of the Great American Novel . Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA 2014, ISBN 9780674051157 .
  • Herbert R. Brown: The Great American Novel. In: American Literature January 7, 1935
  • George Knox: The Great American Novel: Final Chapter. In: American Quarterly April 21, 1969

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Wieland Freund : The Secret of the Unicorn , in: The Literary World , May 10, 2014, p. 1
  2. ^ Clyde Brion Davis: The Great American Novel . Farrar & Rinehart, New York, 1938
  3. ↑ Johan Harstad's meta-memoir: Unfortunately, the jungle of memories is not in chronological order . Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. May 10, 2019. Retrieved November 7, 2019.