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{"id":16296,"date":"2014-07-19T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-07-19T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=1230"},"modified":"2014-07-19T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2014-07-19T00:00:00","slug":"gan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2014\/07\/gan\/","title":{"rendered":"GAN"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n<\/head>

Lawrence Buell\u2019s\u00a0The Dream of the Great American Novel<\/a> addresses a long-standing question in American letters: Is there such a thing as a GAN, and if so, what is it?<\/p>\n

In her\u00a0 TLS review<\/a>, Sarah Graham writes, \u201cIntroduced in print by John W. De Forest in January 1868, the phrase \u2018Great American Novel\u2019 had already been used by P. T. Barnum to mock publishers for puffing their latest books, Buell writes, confirming that the GAN is at least as much a marketing device as a reliable measure of literary merit. The first novel to be named \u2018the Greatest Book of the Age\u2019 was Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/i> (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe, which supposedly provoked the \u2018great war\u2019 that ended slavery in the Southern states. For this reason, Buell deems it the preeminent American example of activist art: it \u201cchanged the world\u201d and so its status endures despite criticism of its depiction of black people. It also shows that it is possible for a GAN to be written by a woman, although critical consensus suggests that hardly any have been. The heyday of serious debate over the Great American Novel ran from the 1860s to the 1920s, when the promise of the American Dream was equally prominent. After The Great Gatsby<\/i>(1925) killed the Dream, along with its hero, interest in pinpointing GANs waxed and waned in popularity, perhaps because an increasingly heterogeneous nation found it hard to believe that a single novel \u2013 even a very long one \u2013 could represent America in all its variety.\u201d<\/p>\n

Buell prefers to judge GANs not as individual novels but as a body of work, and he divides them into four \u201cscripts\u201d or themes: classics of \u201cretelling,\u201d the \u201cup from\u201d script, the \u201cromance that divides,\u201d and \u201cmeganovels.\u201d In the last, Buell places what, to my mind, is the only real candidate for the title of GAN, Moby Dick<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"