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Love and Death in the American Novel

Love and Death in the American Novel

by Leslie A. Fiedler

$24.95
$24.95
American Literature Available as E-Book Essays & Criticism History
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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."

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781681379692
Pages: 512
Publication Date:

Praise

Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel is one of the greatest books every written about American literature. It makes some provocative assertions, true, but more than anything, it's this high-velocity voice-driven exploration of what makes American literature itself. And Fiedler is pound for pound just one of the most incredible stylists we've ever seen. It's a book that provoked me and challenged me and taught me how to think deeper and sharper and better and bolder in language. A stunning book.
—Brandon Taylor

One of the great, essential books on the American imagination . . . an accepted major work.
—The New Yorker

Prof. Fiedler's entertaining account of the American novel's obsessions remains one of the key works of American studies.
—Publishers Weekly

Genuinely original . . . a work of lasting importance . . . a powerful indictment of our culture and of modern culture in general.
—Richard Chase

I know few works of criticism that are so likely to involve the reader whose interest in literature is not of a professional kind . . . it amounts to a general cultural history of the nation.
—Lionel Trilling

In its insights the book remains immensely intelligent, immediate, and vital.
—David Plante, Bookforum

It is not possible to read Leslie Fiedler's criticism without a sense of awe and excitement.
—Los Angeles Times

Dr. Fiedler's witty, exasperating, energetic, penetrating book will prove indispensable...a high level of scholarship and intelligence.
—The Specator

Something of a classic...witty and arresting...[Fiedler] has contrived to make the Americana heritage less wholesome, but far more interesting than once seemed likely.
—Encounter

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