Altogether, the judgment seems nearly unanimous: the very (spurious) notion of the Great American Novel is either soon to be superannuated or, it’s a literary dinosaur we can now confidently-even proudly-name as fully extinct.

Though, instead of shooting down great books written by men like so many clay pigeons, we might simply state the obvious: female subjugation and lack of opportunity have been cornerstones of world history and, there- fore, of literary history, and, as such, necessarily enabled male accomplishment. Perhaps most enduringly, in the great push to open the canon-that equally outdated thing!-to women, the Great American Novel has been castigated as a masculinist invention, one designed to celebrate the literary breadth and depth of the male mind at the expense of its female counterpart. The Great American Novel has alternately been described as a fantasy of the philologist’s cataloging mind, a tattered remnant of hierarchical thinking from a time when the notion of greatness itself went unquestioned, or an elusive siren that’s led many a novelist to wreck on the shores of their own oversized ambition.

It may even be a misstatement to refer to the notion as under attack it’s more like a fl y that’s been unceremoniously swatted away by the dismissive hand of literary discourse. Once a prize expectation of the reading public and the aspiration of the American literary mind, the very idea of the Great American Novel now seems hopelessly naïve and unevolved and, like any fashion that’s become passé, a bit of an embarrassment. In recent decades, the Great American Novel has come under attack.

Light august faulkner