The myth of the Great American Novel in the context of the nonfiction tradition in American literature: The second half of the 20^th century

The paper examines the transformation of the concept of the Great American Novel in American literature of the second half of the 20th century in the context of the “death of the novel” and the development of a literary nonfiction tradition. The Great American Novel is examined as a national mythologeme whose meaning has been continuously redefined throughout the history of American literature. We trace the cultural and historical conditions that contributed to the re-evaluation of this concept, and focus on the distinctive character of “the turbulent 1960s”. Particular attention is paid to the tendency to desacralize the idea of a national epic under the conditions of the absurdity and fragmentation of American reality in the 1960s and 1970s. Within this framework, New Journalism is conceptualized as a literary and cultural phenomenon that introduced alternative strategies for representing social reality. The synthesis of a documentary foundation and literary modes of narration enabled New Journalists to overcome the constraints of the conventional novel and to formulate a new model of a national narrative capable of articulating the fragmented and heterogeneous experience of postwar American society. The article concludes that during this period the New Journalists’ experiments with literary nonfiction forms made it possible to create large-scale narratives representing the collective national experience of the United States and to develop new literary strategies for depicting the complex social and cultural reality of postwar America.

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