IVIV (1) The American Novel and Its Tradition, a classic before Pynchon
alice wellintown
alicewellintown at gmail.com
Wed Aug 26 20:23:02 CDT 2009
As if responding to James Wood, Siims says that one who reads American
Romance with Richardson and Fielding beeside him will be at fault in
every step of his progress.
South Carolina journalist and romancer William Gilmore Simms, in
prefatory letter to The Yemassee (1835): "When I say that our Romance
is the substitute of modern times for the epic or the drama, I do not
mean to say that they are exactly the same things, an yet, examined
thoroughly...the differences between them are very slight. These
differences depend upon the material employed, rather than upon the
particular mode in which it is used. The Romance is of loftier origin
than the Novel. It approximates the poem. It may be described as an
amalgam of the two.
The standards of the Romance . . . are very much those of the epic. It
invests individuals with an absorbing interest--it hurries them
rapidly through crowding and exacting events, in a narrow space of
time--it requires the same unities of play, of purpose, and harmony of
parts, and it seeks for its adventures among the wild and wonderful.
It does not confine itself to what is known, or even what is probable.
It grasps at the possible; and, placing a human agent in hitherto
untried situations, it exercises its ingenuity in extricating him from
them, while describing his feelings and his fortunes in the process"
(Chase 16-17).
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