Images of the Past: Essays on the American Novel

In Images of the Past: Essays on the American Novel, I examine novels by James Fenimore Cooper, Frank Norris, Willa Cather and E. L. Doctorow with the aim of understanding how fiction about history is shaped by such contextual forces as ideology and at the same time reworks them in critical and sometimes transformative fashion. For each novel, I identify the prevailing historical paradigms and relate some linguistic strategies and formal structures to the techniques of historiography. My other major focus is on genre, in particular, how these authors mix elements of the historical romance with evocations of American legends and myths and also draw on older literary modes. My theoretical framework is eclectic and includes ideas drawn from philosophers of history like Hayden White and Louis Mink, scholars of the historical novel such as E. H. Carr, Barbara Foley and Georg Lukàcs, and Mikhail Bakhtin's theories about the chronotope and heteroglossia. In my first chapter, I discuss how in The Last of the Mohicans Cooper modelled his narrative on the captivity narrative and the legend of the hunter and I maintain that while he subscribes on one level to dominant notions about Manifest Destiny, he also uses his narrative to tentatively voice an alternative vision of American society as truly heterogeneous. In examining McTeague, I focus less on Norris's naturalism than on his adoption of the grotesque in order to defamiliarize, and therefore make newly visible, the contradictions and the absurdities of certain dominant patterns of behavior and thought in the late nineteenth century. In my analysis of My Antonia I show how Cather adopted the nostalgic vision of the classical pastoral tradition of Theocritus and Virgil to focus her representation of American Agrarianism and to create her female myth of the frontier in contradistinction to the predominantly masculine saga of the conquest of the West. My study of Ragtime emphasizes Doctorow’s invention of a form of historical fiction appropriate for the postmodern era. I highlight his juxtaposition of nostalgic images of the past with more somber ones and suggest that one of his important intentions was to stimulate the reader to meditate on the ideology behind popular accounts of American society and culture at the turn of the century. Considering the vision of history that emerges from his narrative, I advance the hypothesis that he was influenced by Ovid's Metamorphoses of which I also find traces in certain structural and thematic elements of his novel.