This astute guide to the literary achievements of American novelists in the twentieth century places their work in its historical context and offers detailed analyses of landmark novels based on a clearly laid out set of tools for analyzing narrative form. • Includes a valuable overview of twentieth-and early twenty-first century American literary history • Provides analyses of numerous core texts including The Great Gatsby, Invisible Man, The Sound and the Fury, The Crying of Lot 49 and Freedom • Relates these individual novels to the broader artistic movements of modernism and postmodernism • Explains and applies key principles of rhetorical reading • Includes numerous cross-novel comparisons and contrasts
