RE: Hunting the Great Clich� = Great American Novel

OK, there's the "Great American Etc." solved, but the author references a
wayback machine, and I wonder if any of our knowledgeable docents know where
THAT one is from?"
Barbara

>From: "eConsultant - Sanjeev Narang" <econsultant@gmail.com>
>Reply-To: ask@eConsultant.com
>To: "TAM Group" <tamdocents@googlegroups.com>
>Subject: Hunting the Great Cliché = Great American Novel
>Date: Sun, 4 Jun 2006 22:38:56 -0700
>
>
>History of the term ... "Great American Novel" ....
>
>(slightly late for the GAT exhibit ... but good useful information,
>nonetheless.)
>
>Sanjeev
>
>
>http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=37159
>
>Hunting the Great Cliché
>The Strangest Thing About That New York Times List Was Its Premise
>
>BY PAUL COLLINS
>
>The question seems simple enough, even if the answer is not: "What is
>the best work of fiction of the last 25 years?" The idle American
>contest in the New York Times two weeks ago asked 124 critics,
>authors, and editors for the best work, not a best work, the
>implication being that there can only be one. Toni Morrison's Beloved
>was duly cited. But the singularity of that question begged the cliché
>that Times critic A. O. Scott immediately invoked in his introductory
>essay: the Great American Novel. Granted, Scott classes the Great
>American Novel as a fantastical creature along the lines of Sasquatch,
>but then he promptly straps on his snowshoes and tries to hunt it down
>anyway.
>
>Where did this mythical beast come from?
>
>The Great Gatsby is one of the other usual quarries whenever critics
>don their dorky orange hunting vests. Yet even by that novel's
>publication in 1925, our literary Sasquatch was old and toothless,
>because a few years earlier critic Carl Van Doren had spotted the Big
>Hairy Phrase loping through an 1872 North American Review essay by T.
>S. Perry. Dig up that volume and you discover that the first thing
>Perry did was dismiss the idea: "We have often wondered that the
>people who raise the outcry for the 'Great American Novel' did not see
>that, so far from being of any assistance to our fellow countryman who
>is trying to win fame by writing fiction, they have rather stood in
>his way by setting up before him a false aim for his art, and by
>giving the critical reader a defective standard by which to judge his
>work."
>
>That's hardly an auspicious beginning. But I couldn't help feeling
>that I'd encountered the phrase even earlier. And unlike Carl Van
>Doren, I was backed by the greatest intellectual resource in human
>history: a university library that sells Mountain Dew in the lobby.
>Along with its endless aisles of crumbling bound magazines, there are
>also millions of searchable pages of 19th-century periodicals now
>digitized by everyone from the New York Times and the Times of London
>to the Making of America project and Newspaperarchive.com. But even
>before I sat down and booted up, I remembered where I'd first spotted
>the phrase: in a book by that most astute of American observers, P. T.
>Barnum.
>
>"In what business is there not humbug?" he asks in his 1866 book
>Humbugs of the World. Barnum immediately cites crooked milkmen, shifty
>land agents, and of course, "the publisher with his great American
>Novel." Lest you suspect that old P. T. is a little hard on the
>publishers, dialing our library Wayback Machine a decade backward
>materializes this bit of fluffery from the Tioga County Agitator for
>February 1, 1855: "This is the great American novel so loudly called
>for by the new party." And what immortal novel is it? Stanhope
>Burleigh, by Helen Dhu. You know, the famous novel about... oh, you
>don't know.
>
>Still, the choice of Helen Dhu is telling: It was the pseudonym used
>by Ellen Brown Lester for what was in fact a deeply bigoted and
>anti-Catholic novel. The full title of the book is the almost
>comically baiting Stanhope Burleigh: The Jesuits in Our Homes. And
>that "new party" that the newspaper had referred to as demanding a
>Great American Novel? That would be the xenophobic Know-Nothing Party.
>I won't go into 1850s political history, but let's just say that if
>they were still around today, they'd send the National Guard to build
>a 20-foot high fence around Ireland.
>
>All of which makes the very notion of the Great American Novel sound,
>well, un-American. And so it is. The earliest use I found dates to
>August 7, 1852, where it was used not by a critic but by a publisher
>right you were, Mr. Barnum to hype the first serialized issue of a new
>book. The great novel in question? Uncle Tom's Cabin. Stowe's work
>certainly has a historical claim, if not an aesthetic one, to that
>honor. But the granting of such a title does seem curiously
>restrictive in a country composed of a multitude of regional voices
>and genres, a defiant and unruly mess of democratic artistry. To
>create a hierarchy to coronate the Great American Novel smacks of the
>monarchic class system this country was founded to spurn. And perhaps
>that's because the idea was invented by Stowe's publisher in London.
>
>"The Great American Novel" is not American at all: It's British.
>
>Paul Collins is the author of several books, including Banvard's
>Folly: Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn't Change the World.
>
>--
>Regards,
>Sanjeev Narang
>
>***
>
>email: ask {*at*} eConsultant dot com
><a href="http://www.eConsultant.com">www.eConsultant.com</a>
>
>>

--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Tacoma Art Museum Docents" group.
To post to this group, send email to tamdocents@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to tamdocents-unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tamdocents
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---