The American mystery: American literature from Emerson to DeLillo

Abstract

Foreword Edward Said I. Introduction A. F. Bell 1. 'Lustres and condiments': Ralph Waldo Emerson in his Essays 2. 'A summer in the country': Nathaniel Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance 3. 'Nothing but cakes and ale': Herman Melville's White-Jacket 4. 'All interweavingly working together': Herman Melville's Moby-Dick 5. Melville's counterfeit detector: The Confidence Man 6. Henry James: the story in it - and the story without it 7. Henry James's 'saddest story': The Other House 8. Henry James and Shakespeare 9. 'Feelings of middle life': William Dean Howells's Indian Summer 10. 'The story of the moon that never rose': F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby 11. Don DeLillo and 'the American mystery': Underworld 12. 'The rubbish-tip for subjunctive hopes': Thomas Pynchon's Mason and Dixon.