Name: Love and Death in the American Novel
Price: 24.95 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Leslie A. Fiedler
ISBN: 9781681379692

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.”

“Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel is one of the greatest books ever 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

“[Love and Death] is an incredible repository of vexations, bafflements, witticisms, and brilliancies. Ostensibly a history of American fiction from 1789 to 1959, it is in fact ‘a kind of gothic novel,’ as Fiedler described it, with a quick pulse and a wry, expansive style . . . It is a polemical, spirited salvo that never pretends to be a work of dispassionate social science. Its tone is decisive, but it speaks with the imperious authority of taste, not the desiccated one of surveys and statistics . . . ‘I have, I admit, a low tolerance for detached chronicling and cool analysis,’ [Fiedler] once confessed in a review. ‘I long for the raised voice, the howl of rage or love.’ And, in Love and Death, how he howls!” —Becca Rothfeld, The New Yorker

“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

Love and Death in the American Novel

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