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THE AMERICAN NOVEL OF MANNERS

James W. Tuttleton

SOURCE: "The Sociological Matrix of the Novel of Manners," in The Novel of Manners in America, The University of North Carolina Press, 1972, pp. 7-19.

[In the excerpt below, Tuttleton recounts and refutes claims that the novel of manners is not a viable form in American literature.]

The charge that the novel is dead, so often heard in the literary criticism of the 1950s, is today a dead issue.

There is one type of novel, though, which is generally held to be deader than usual—especially in this country. And when, in our recent criticism, writers have reflected on the death of the American novel, they have usually meant a certain kind of novel—the American novel of manners. The obituaries pronounced by our critics upon this kind of novel are primarily oversimplifications of a point of view expressed by Lionel Trilling in his provocative essay "Manners, Morals, and the...

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1. Introduction
2. Representative Works
3. Social And Political Order
4. Domestic Order
5. Depictions Of Gender
6. The American Novel Of Manners
7. Further Reading
8. Copyright