Discuss the distinctive feature of the American novel.

 The Great American Novel is a canonical novel that is thought to embody the essence of America, generally written by an American and dealing in some way with the question of America’s national character. The term was coined by John William De Forest in an 1868 essay. Although De Forest mentioned Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe as a possible contender, he noted that the Great American Novel had most likely not been written yet. Writer Henry James shortened the term to GAN in 1880. The idea has evolved and continued into the modern age, although America’s national development has led to it being dismissed by some as no longer applicable.

The early 1900s saw the idea considered as “extinct as the dodo”. It did slowly resurge from the 1920s onwards.  Clyde Brion Davis and Philip Roth both wrote novels about the GAN, titled as such-the latter in the 1970s, a time of prosperity for the concept. Since the concept’s creation an assortment of novels have been declared the GAN, ranging from The Last of the Mohicans (1826), to Invisible Man (1952), to Telegraph Avenue (2012). Interpretations of the GAN has also arisen.

Writers and academics have commented upon the term’s pragmatics, the different types of GANs and its relation to race and gender. Equivalents to the GAN, such as the Great American painting and poem, have been proposed. Portrayed directly, by dealing with his morals by signifying characters like the Leatherstocking hero (in Cooper’s novels) as the edifice morality in life; Melville and Hawthorne, by romanticizing the mysterious and mythicizing the reality, dealt with the contemporary social reality, indirectly.

In any case, man vis-a-vis his society is the core concern of the nineteenth century American novelist. Also, as the American novel is different in its very definition, by its historical reasons of the formation of the American character, its definitions of the novelistic form varies with that of a European connotation of a novel. For, if the nineteenth-century European novel described as settled social reality, with its main concern for the class conflict in a bourgeois milieu, the 19 Century American novel, by its reasons of historically evolving of a new society has to deal with a still forming society.

It was the land of social experimentation “in exploring the bases of moral values in individual’s relationship with his society. In this sense, according to Lionel Trilling, “the American writers of the genius have not turned their minds to society”.  Further, he says that, the American novelists at that time sought only “a tangential” relationship to society. The real basis of the novel has never existed in America because, there was no tension between a middle class and the aristocracy.

In any case, the main purpose of the American novel in the 19th century was to describe the complex of ideas and ideals which defined the beginnings of the great American experiment, in the New World, with its own kind of religion, culture and compulsions of environment and history. If the 19th century English novel studied the impact of society on the individual in Dickens and George Eliot, in the American novel of the same time, it was defining an individual, with his staunch commitment to (more than anything else), his authentic and unmistakable stamp of individualism.

These qualities of the nineteenth-century American life, in its complex impact of tradition and environment, moral, religious, philosophical and expansionist purposes are sufficiently reflected in the American novel form, in the writings of at least three major novelists, namely Washington Irving, Edgar Allen Poe, James Fennimoor Cooper, Melville and Hawthorne. There may be two important concerns for the novelists of the nineteenth century American, in an interrelated manner. The main concern of these writers is to portray the individual’s relationship with his society.

If in writers like Cooper and Mark Twain, this many-sided relationship of the individual to his society was portrayed directly, by dealing with his morals by signifying characters like the Leatherstocking hero in Cooper’s novels) as the edifice morality in life; Melville and Hawthorne, by romanticizing the mysterious and mythicizing the reality, dealt with the contemporary social reality, indirectly. The characteristics of the 19th century American novel differ based upon the period to which is being referred to. 

There were three different writing movements which took place during the 19th century: The Romantic Period, The American Renaissance, and The Realist Movement (Realism).

The main characteristics of the Romantic Period (dating 1800-1860) were:

• The theme of the personal journey in regards to independence.
• Romantics wished to move “life” from the corrupt urban areas to those of the nature-filled rural areas.
• Romantics associated this area (the rural) with clarity, purity, and independence.

-The Romantics valued intuition and feeling over reason, the power of imagination, and viewed life as it should be (idyllic), instead of how it really was. The American Renaissance (1840-1860-note the overlap with Romanticism) was a period that installed value in what it meant to be American. The Renaissance writers wanted to examine the possibilities associated with human ability while paying special attention to an individual’s ego.

The American Renaissance writers desperately wanted to define themselves as American, and not British, writers.  The genre of novel gave the novelists a medium to speak freely to the world seeking comfort and knowledge contrasted to the other genres of literature in which apart from creativity a writer has to seek many other techniques of writing which sometimes hurdle the writer to express his or her true meaning.

The category is as wide as ‘poetry’: novels are long prose fictions, including every kind of Plot (tragic, comic), all styles and manners of dealing with their material (from the satiric to rhapsodic) and showing a capacity to cover every imaginative subject matter from all points of view. They range from the popular Thriller to the most esoteric literary artifice. The capacity of the form to absorb other literary styles, its freedom to develop in any direction and its flexibility, have made the novel the major modern literary form.

There are many reasons which show the absence of cultural voices in the early American novel. First of all there was no authentic American language or medium of expression available for literary purposes.  Americans were in a process to coin new style of language that could be considered as the American language distinguished from the English style or Englsih writing style. There was also lack of cultural support for the Americans to create new ideas or creative efforts.

America due to the impact of colonialism was not in a strong position to depict its utmost culture in its works of literature American culture tended to be parochial and generally distrustful of any written expression that was not didactic.

For example, clergy such as Janathan Edwards taught that reading novels was an indulgence leading to moral decline, Due to an unstable society, there could be no stable “American” genre of the novel. Cathy Davidson and others have argued that some novels tried to attain an ideological status (Revolution and the Word, 1986) which is a critique of the existing order, and that the more popular the genre became, the more those vested with cultural authority worried over their loss of dominance.  This was especially true because novels, unlike sermons, required no intermediaries for interpretation.

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