The Modern American Novel

by Malcolm Bradbury

A monumental critical history that sums up the American literary achievement from Henry James to Thomas Pynchon.
Beginning with the 1890s and the seminal novels of Henry James and Theodore Dreiser, this highly acclaimed volume charts the flowering of the American narrative tradition. It takes in Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner; the emergence of Jewish and African-American literatures; and the works of Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, and Kurt Vonnegut. Updated to consider the most important fiction of the 1980s and early 90s, The Modern American Novel is a comprehensive critical history of American literary achievement."

Genres: Literary Criticism, Fiction, Reference, Criticism, Literature

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Sir Malcolm Stanley Bradbury CBE was an English author and academic. He is best known to a wider public as a novelist. Although he is often compared with David Lodge, his friend and a contemporary as a British exponent of the campus novel genre, Bradbury's books are consistently darker in mood and less playful both in style and language. His best known novel The History Man, published in 1975, is a dark satire of academic life in the "glass and steel" universities—the then-fashionable newer universities of England that had followed their "redbrick" predecessors—which in 1981 was made into a successful BBC television serial. The protagonist is the hypocritical Howard Kirk, a sociology professor at the fictional University of Watermouth.

He completed his PhD in American studies at the University of Manchester in 1962, moving to the University of East Anglia (his second novel, Stepping Westward, appeared in 1965), where he became Professor of American Studies in 1970 and launched the world-renowned MA in Creative Writing course, which Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro both attended. He published Possibilities: Essays on the State of the Novel in 1973, The History Man in 1975, Who Do You Think You Are? in 1976, Rates of Exchange in 1983, Cuts: A Very Short Novel in 1987, retiring from academic life in 1995. Malcolm Bradbury became a Commander of the British Empire in 1991 for services to Literature, and was made a Knight Bachelor in the New Year Honours 2000, again for services to Literature.

Bradbury was a productive academic writer as well as a successful teacher; an expert on the modern novel, he published books on Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow and E. M. Forster, as well as editions of such modern classics as F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and a number of surveys and handbooks of modern fiction, both British and American.

He also wrote extensively for television, including scripting series such as Anything More Would Be Greedy, The Gravy Train, the sequel The Gravy Train Goes East (which explored life in Bradbury's fictional Slaka), and adapting novels such as Tom Sharpe's Blott on the Landscape and Porterhouse Blue, Alison Lurie's Imaginary Friends and Kingsley Amis's The Green Man. His last television script was for Dalziel and Pascoe series 5, produced by Andy Rowley. The episode 'Foreign Bodies' was screened on BBC One on July 15, 2000.

Reviews

[Thomas Goddard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting book.

I think that I forget that American Literature is actually foreign to me. You get lulled, as a Brit, into the arrogant perspective that American literature, being in English, is just a quirky offshoot. More an accent than a different culture.

Obviously that is very wrong. And the truth is that if I engage my brain for long enough to think about it, I recognise it as very different from my native land.

Books like this re-contextualise literature from the Colonies and places them back into the correct historical and cultural place.

I found this well written, concise and informative. A very good refresher.

[Andrea Fiore · Rating 4 out of 5]

"For, at its best, the novel is not simply an infinitely repeatable type, a body of habitual and therefore apparently innocent styles and modes of expression, a set of fixed sub-genres open to local modernization by fresh authors; it is an ever-changing act of apprehension, belonging in the world of our changing thought, our changing history, our changing ways of naming experience, and it cannot stand still."

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very well written and insightful overview of the American novel from the late 19th century through to the 1990s. I first dipped into this many years ago as a (science) undergrad; reading it again now I realise how important it was in introducing me to the world of literary criticism and to key works of modern American fiction.

The text is generally extremely lucid, with just a few bits where the author's argument becomes somewhat elliptical and unclear (to me at least). One aspect that stands out when reading this in the 2020s: the selection of authors and books is very weighted towards white male authors; I expect any similar overview these days would include more diversity.

[Wad]

t i think it is delightful to read such book.