Love and Death in the American Novel - Paperback

by Leslie a. Fiedler (Author)

A provocative work of American literary criticism covering Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Faulkner, and others. Fielder's groundbreaking work changed the way we see the American novel--and American culture at large--forever.

Leslie A. Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel is a study of American fiction from its beginnings up through the 1960s. In this tour de force from the great mid-twentieth-century era of literary criticism, Fiedler argues that American literature is gothic at heart, marked by a terror of sexuality and an obsession with violence, escape, and death. The American writer, he says, confronts a world that is "without a significant history or a substantial past; a world which had left behind the terror of Europe not for the innocence it dreamed of, but for new and special guilts associated with the rape of nature and the exploitation of dark-skinned people." Fiedler's own book, as brilliantly written as it is provocatively conceived, is itself a contribution to American literature. His puckish suggestion is that we read it "not as a conventional scholarly book--or an eccentric one--but a kind of gothic novel (complete with touches of black humor) whose subject is American experience as recorded in our classic fiction."

Author Biography

Leslie A. Fiedler (1917-2003) was born in Newark, New Jersey, and educated at New York University and the University of Wisconsin. He served as a Japanese interpreter with the United States Navy during World War II and was, for many years, a professor of English at the University of Montana and the State University of New York at Buffalo. He published two novels and three collections of short stories but was best known as a versatile and incisive critic. Among his books are Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self, The Stranger in Shakespeare, and Fiedler on the Roof: Essays on Literature and Jewish Identity.