ABSTRACT
Whenever a substantial work of fi ction which sets out to defi ne the American experience is published, it is likely that some earnest literary critic or book reviewer will hail it as a ‘Great American Novel’. So hackneyed is this critical convention that Philip Roth, one of the authors who features in this book, devoted an entire work, The Great American Novel (1973), to its parody. His novel begins with an epigraph from Frank Norris’s The Responsibilities of the Novelist (1903): ‘the Great American Novel is not extinct like the Dodo, but mythical like the Hippogriff.’1 But the search for the Great American Novel is as quixotic, and ultimately as fruitless, as the quest for these mythical creatures. If the Great American Novel has ever existed, it is largely as a fi gment of the critical imagination, rumours of its existence no more reliable than the latest journalistic report of its appearance.
