James Phelan 
Reading the American Novel 1920-2010 [PDF ebook] 

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Reading the American Novel, 1920-2010
1
1 Principles of Rhetorical Reading 23
2 The Age of Innocence (1920): Bildung and the Ethics of Desire
39
3 The Great Gatsby (1925): Character Narration, Temporal Order,
and Tragedy 61
4 A Farewell to Arms (1929): Bildung, Tragedy, and the Rhetoric
of Voice 85
5 The Sound and the Fury (1929): Portrait Narrative as Tragedy
105
6 Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937): Bildung and the Rhetoric
and Politics of Voice 127
7 Invisible Man (1952): Bildung, Politics, and Rhetorical Design
149
8 Lolita (1955): The Ethics of the Telling and the Ethics of the
Told 171
9 The Crying of Lot 49 (1966): Mimetic Protagonist,
Thematic-Synthetic Storyworld 193
10 Beloved (1987): Sethe’s Choice and Morrison’s
Ethical Challenge 213
11 Freedom (2010): Realism after Postmodernism 237
Index 261

James Phelan is Distinguished University Professor in the Department of English at Ohio State University, USA. His wide-ranging research in narrative theory includes influential studies of literary character, narrative progression, unreliable narration, and the ethics of reading as well as significant fresh interpretations of numerous twentieth-century American and British novels and short stories. The editor of Narrative, the journal International Society for the Study of Narrative, Prof Phelan is also a prolific author and editor whose credits include the prize-winning Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration (2005), the Blackwell Companion to Narrative Theory (2005) and the collaboratively written Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates (2012).