Misc. on Romance in Amer Lit

[Mark Kohut]

I happened to get an old, olde mass paperback of
Henry James's THE AMERICAN. Was 50c back in its day.

Had an introduction by a good American critic, R. P. Blackmur,
which is why. The intro is copyrighted 1960.

I looked up the initial date of Richard Chase's AMERICAN NOVEL AND
ITS TRADITION, the critical work which best laid out the case for
Romance, lit sense, as a---THE--major mode for the American novel.
We have used the concept and discussed it hereon. it was 1957.

I mention because Blackmur says James was right in calling his novel
a Romance. (not my usual way of understanding James)

Anyway, HJ sez...The real is what we cannot NOT know...
while Romance is "the way things don't happen may be artfully made to pass
for the way things do"...

not irrelevant to Pynchon, right?
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l