Great American Novel
Practically, the term refers to a small number of books that have historically been the nexus of discussion, including Moby-Dick (1851), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), The Great Gatsby (1925), and Gone with the Wind (1936).
Writers and academics have commented upon the term's pragmatics, the different types of novels befitting of title and the idea's relation to race and gender.
Recipe 3, a 'narrative centering on the lifeline of a socially paradigmatic figure ... whose odyssey tilts on the one side toward picaresque and on the other toward a saga of personal transformation, or failure of such.
[14] Edith Wharton complained that the Great American Novel concept held a narrow view of the nation, simply being concerned with "Main Street".
"[5] When asked in a 2004 interview if the Great American Novel could be written, Norman Mailer—who had long been interested in the idea[24]—said it could not, for United States had become too developed of a nation.
[25] Tony Tulathimutte similarly dismissed it as "a comforting romantic myth, which wrongly assumes that commonality is more significant than individuality".
[20][27][23] Commenting upon the idea's racial aspects and presence in popular conscious, Hugh Kenner wrote in a 1953 issue of Perspective that: The lad who was going to produce 'The Great American Novel' as soon as he had gotten his mind around his adolescent experience is part of the folklore of the 'twenties, and the prevalence of this myth documents the awareness of the young American of thirty years ago that the consciousness of his race remained uncreated.
[15] Viet Thanh Nguyen said that "[o]ne of the unspoken silences of the Great American Novel is the assumption that it can only be written by white men".
[28] Laura Miller wrote, in a Salon article, that "The presumption and the belligerence embodied in this ideal have put off many American women writers".
[24] Although British analyst Faye Hammill noted that Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos, was one of the few that 'doesn't stink'.
[29] Emily Temple of Literary Hub suggested that if the protagonist of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1963) were male it would likely be considered more seriously as a Great American Novel contender.
[32] Journalist John Walsh offered a national equal in the form of Russian writer Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (1869); Buell felt that Australia was the only country to replicate America's search.
[35] The second is "the romance of the divide", which imagines national rifts in the "form of a family history and/or heterosexual love affair"—race often plays a role.
[19] Fourthly, novels which are composed of a diverse cast of characters "imagined as social microcosms or vanguards" and who are placed with events and crises that serve to "constitute an image of 'democratic' promise or dysfunction".
[18]Denoting an apocryphal state, film critic A. O. Scott compared the GAN to the Yeti, the Loch Ness monster and the Sasquatch.
