Discuss the distinctive features of the American novel.

portrayed directly, by dealing with his morals by signifying characters like the Leatherstocking hero (in Cooper’s novels) as the edifice morality in life; Melville and Hawthorne, by romanticizing the mysterious and mythicizing the reality, dealt with the contemporary social reality, indirectly.

In any case, man vis-a-vis his society is the core concern of. the nineteenth century American novelist. Also, as the American novel is different in its very definition, by its historical reasons of the formation of the American character, its definitions of the novelistic form varies with that of a European connotation of a novel. For, if the nineteenth century European novel described a f settled social reality, with its main concern for the class conflict in a bourgeois milieu, the 19′ Century American novel, by its reasons of historically evolving of a new society hatl to deal with a still forming society.

It was the land of social experimentation “in exploring” the bases of moral values in individual’s relationship with his society. In this sense, according to Lionel Trilling, “the American writers of the genius have not turned their minds to society”. Further, he says that, the American novelists at that time sought only “a tangential” relationship to society. The real basis of the novel has never existed in America because, there was no tension between a middle class and the aristocracy.

In any case, the main purpose of the American novel in the 19th century was to describe the complex of ideas and ideals which defined the beginnings of the great American experiment, in the New World, with its own kind of religion, culture and compulsions of environment and history. If the 19th century English novel studied the impact of society on the individual in Dickens and George Eliot, in the American novel of the same time, it was defining an individual, with his staunch commitment to (more than anything else), his authentic and unmistakable stamp of individualism.