vignette|La case de l'Oncle Tom, par Edwin Longsden Long, 1866. Le grand roman américain () est un concept littéraire désignant des romans jugés particulièrement méritoires et décrivant la culture des États-Unis à un moment spécifique de leur histoire. Les auteurs de ces romans sont a priori des Américains possédant une connaissance approfondie des conditions de vie, de la culture et des opinions des citoyens américains à une époque donnée. La narration intègre le style d'expression de ces derniers, afin d'illustrer les usages lexicaux alors en vigueur et de refléter la culture américaine et la manière dont elle est perçue, et cherche à capturer une expérience américaine spécifique. Le concept est parfois assimilé une transposition américaine de l'épopée nationale.

Histoire Des ouvrages de fiction ont vu le jour pendant la période coloniale de l'Amérique, dès le . Néanmoins, à mesure que se développe le sentiment d'une identité américaine au , est apparue une littérature fondée sur ce sentiment.

L'expression grand roman américain émane directement d'un essai (The Great American Novel, 1868) de John William De Forest, romancier de la Guerre de Sécession.

Dans son assertion moderne, ce terme est souvent employé au sens figuré pour qualifier les classiques de la littérature américaine.

Œuvres rattachés au genre Selon les époques, les romans ci-dessous ont été considérés comme appartenant au genre grand roman américain.

1826 : James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (Le Dernier des Mohicans) 1850 : Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (La Lettre écarlate) "There are, Buell says, four main types of potential Great American Novels. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter epitomises the first – a cultural “master narrative”, identified as such by the number of reinterpretations and imitations that follow in its wake." 1851 : Herman Melville, Moby Dick (Moby Dick) 1852 : Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin (La Case de l'Oncle Tom). 1876 : Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Les Aventures de Tom Sawyer) "Considered one of the great American novels..." 1884 : Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Les Aventures d'Huckleberry Finn) It was called the “great American novel” as early as 1891 by the English writer Andrew Lang... ”

1925 : F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (Gatsby le Magnifique)The Columbia History of the American Novel By Emory Elliott, Cathy N. Davidson p. 323 "The Great Gatsby (1925), a work still frequently nominated as 'the great American novel.'" 1925 : Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy (Une tragédie américaine) 1929 : Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (L'Adieu aux armes) 1932 : William Faulkner, Light in August (Lumière d'août)C.E. Morgan, ["'Light in August' is Faulkner's Great American Novel" The Daily Beast Aug. 16, 2012 http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/08/16/c-e-morgan-light-in-august-is-faulkner-s-great-american-novel.html]. Retrieved October 5, 2016. 1936 : William Faulkner, Absalon, Absalon ! 1936 : Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind (Autant en emporte le vent)Gone With the Wind, Georgia Public Broadcasting. Retrieved October 5, 2016. ("Margaret Mitchell’s epic novel of love and war has long been heralded as The Great American Novel."). 1938 : John Dos Passos, U.S.A. Trilogy (La Trilogie U.S.A.) Norman Mailer is a Pulitzer Prize winning literary critic, and it is his opinion that: "The Great American Novel is no longer writable. We can't do what John Dos Passos did. His trilogy on America came as close to the Great American Novel as anyone. You can't cover all of America now. It's too detailed." 1939 : John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (Les Raisins de la colère) Richard Rodriguez is a famous American writer. In this interview he referred to the Grapes of Wrath as The Great American Novel: "There hasn't been anything like this novel since it was written. And this is the great American novel that everyone keeps waiting for but it has been written now." Nixon quotes John Springer, author of The Fondas (Citadel, 1973), a book about Henry Fonda and his role in film version of The Grapes of Wrath: "The Great American Novel made one of the few enduring Great American Motion Pictures." 1940 : Richard Wright, Native Son (Un enfant du pays) 1951 : J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (L'Attrape-cœurs) 1952 : Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (Homme invisible, pour qui chantes-tu ?) 1953 : Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (Les Aventures d'Augie March) Martin Amis is a well-known British novelist and professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester. It is his opinion that "The Adventures of Augie March is the Great American Novel. Search no further. All the trails went cold 42 years ago. The quest did what quests very rarely do; it ended." 1955 : Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita Mary Elizabeth Williams is Salon's Table Talk host. She opens her review with these lines: "Some say the Great American Novel is Huckleberry Finn, some say it's The Jungle, some say it's The Great Gatsby. -- Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita". "These are familiar features of daily life in the super state from which, it should be noted, high modernism in the United States - in theory and in practice alike, fifties aestheticism organized around Pound and Henry James and Wallace Stevens and the New Criticism - was in desperate flight; of our great modern writers, only Nabokov handled this kind of material, in Lolita, which thereby at once became The Great American Novel,- but of course he was a foreigner to begin with." (Page 146-147).Nabakov is generally regarded as a Russian writer, even when he used the English language: 1960 : Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (Ne tirez pas sur l'oiseau moqueur) "It is Lee's only book and one of the handful that could earn the title of Great American Novel." 1960 : John Updike, Rabbit, Run (Cœur de lièvre) et les suites "To consider the 1,700-odd pages of his Harry Angstrom saga—the bounding tetralogy of Rabbit books and their limping postscript—is to find yourself considering a work with an excellent claim as the Great American Novel" 1973 : Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (L'Arc-en-ciel de la gravité) "It is the Great American Novel come at last, a postmodern masterpiece." "Thomas Pynchon's big book quickly confirmed him as one of the few novelists of unprecedented genius to emerge in the postwar era. Here was the Great American Novel at last. The reviewers' favorite comparisons were to Moby Dick and Ulysses." 1975 : William Gaddis, JR "Gaddis has written the long-awaited great American novel... A beautiful book and a brilliant author." 1981 : John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces (La Conjuration des imbéciles). "Un exemple de ce que l’on a appelé le «grand roman américain», foisonnant, drôle, exhaustif, rocambolesque, cruel et toujours moderne trente ans après sa consécration." 1985 : Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West (Méridien de sang) - 1985 : Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove.https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1356&dat=19850901&id=qQYkAAAAIBAJ&sjid=YgYEAAAAIBAJ&pg=7164,285599 1987 : Toni Morrison, Beloved 1996 : David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (L'Infinie Comédie) 1997 : Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon "Pynchon's finest work yet...if anyone is still looking for the Great American Novel then this may well be it." 1997 : Philip Roth, American Pastoral (Pastorale américaine) 1997 : Don DeLillo, Underworld (Outremonde)

2000 : Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Les Extraordinaires Aventures de Kavalier et Clay) "I'm not sure what the exact definition of a 'great American novel' is, but I'm pretty sure that Michael Chabon's sprawling, idiosyncratic, and wrenching new book is one." 2004 : Marilynne Robinson, Gilead "PW nominated an earlier novel, 1980′s Housekeeping, but we’re equally fond of this one, which won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award, the autobiography a dying congregationalist pastor in a flyover state. It’s a beautifully written personal history that doubles as a national one. Bonus: Obama lists the novel as one of his favorites on his official Facebook profile, for whatever that’s worth to you." "Gilead is one of the great American novels of the early 21st century, and deserved its 2005 Pulitzer Prize." 2010 : Jonathan Franzen, Freedom "Jonathan Franzen's new novel Freedom is a modern classic." "If Freedom doesn't qualify as a Great American Novel for our time, then I don't know what would." "Freedom feels big in a different way, a way that not much other American fiction does right now."

Voir aussi Épopée nationale

Notes et références

Catégorie:Littérature américaine par genre