Love and Death in the American Novel

A provocative work of American literary criticism covering Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Faulkner, and others. Fielder's groundbreaking work changed the way we see the American novel-and American culture at large-forever.

n this tour de force from the great mid-twentieth-century era of literary criticism, Fiedler argues that American literature is gothic at heart, marked by a terror of sexuality and an obsession with violence, escape, and death.