Pt. 1. Prototypes and Early Adaptations. 1. The Novel and America. 2. The Novel's Audience and the Sentimental Love Religion. 3. Richardson and the Tragedy of Seduction. 4. The Bourgeois Sentimental Novel and the Female Audience. 5. The Beginnings of the Anti-Bourgeois Sentimental Novel in America. 6. Charles Brockden Brown and the Invention of the American Gothic. 7. James Fenimore Cooper and the Historical Romance -- Pt. 2. Achievement and Frustration. 8. Clarissa in America: Toward Marjorie Morningstar. 9. Good Good Girls and Good Bad Boys: Clarissa as a Juvenile. 10. The Revenge on Woman: From Lucy to Lolita. 11. The Failure of Sentiment and the Evasion of Love. 12. The Blackness of Darkness: Edgar Allan Poe and the Development of the Gothic. 13. The Power of Blackness: Faustian Man and the Cult of Violence
Summary
This work views in depth both American literature and character from the time of the American Revolution to the present. From it, there emerges Fiedler's once scandalous - now increasingly accepted - judgment that our literature is incapable of dealing with adult sexuality and is pathologically obsessed with death
