The Modern American Novel [antikvár]

Preface to the Revised Edition And so I say one can have at any moment in one's life all of English literature inside you and behind you and you do not know if there is going to be any more of it. However very likely there is, there is at any rate going to be more American literature. Very likely. Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America (1935) The revised edition of this book covers the hundred years of the American novel from the 1890s to the 1990s: the crucial period, that is, from the early beginnings of modernism to what seems to be the end or fading of postmodernism. The book has been very substantially revised, to do fair justice to the important new fiction that has come out since it was first conceived, to reflect my own altering sense of the contemporary directions, and my own changes of emphasis and critical judgement. Therefore the whole text has been fundamentally reworked and enlarged, the two original last chapters (Chapters 6 and 7), have been totally rewritten, and two extended new chapters have been added, to bring the story up to the immediate present and alter the balance and emphasis of the whole plot or argument. Postmodernism has always considered endings provisional, and had a taste for changing them. It seems very reasonable that I should apply the same principle to postmodernism itself. A hundred years is a long time in the history of the novel, especially when that period is also one of massive change in American culture and history—and when the change has affected not just the nature and spirit of the American novel itself but the direction of fiction everywhere. Indeed the move of American fiction to its late modern power and influence is an essential part of the story. It should be remembered that the novel was a fairly late (and a virtually illegal) immigrant to new and pristine America: Jefferson condemned it as a European phenomenon, Noah Webster saw it as dangerous and encouraging to vice. Not