The American vision

"This work reinterprets four major American novelists of the nineteenth century in terms of their approach to the society of their time. Winner of the Porter Prize and the Egleston History Prize - both awarded by Yale University - the book marks a radical departure in the understanding of American literature and culture, and the novel as a genre, and will be useful to scholars and students." "James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain are shown to have accepted the American social order with realism, though not without critical evaluation. But at the same time, each writer in his own way also projected the image of an ideal society."--BOOK JACKET.