The book views in depth both American literature and American character from the time of the revolution to the present (1967). From it there emerges Professor Fiedler’s once scandalous – now increasingly accepted – judgement that American literature is incapable of dealing with adult sexuality and is pathologically obsessed with death.

CONTENTS:

PART ONE: PROTOTYPES AND EARLY ADAPTATIONS
1. The Novel and America
2. The Novel’s Audience and the Sentimental Love Religion
3. Richardson and the Tragedy of Seduction
4. The Bourgeois Sentimental Novel and the Female Audience
5. The Beginnings of the Anti-Bourgeois Sentimental Novel in America
6. Charles Brockden Brown and the Invention of the American Gothic
7. James Fenimore Cooper and the Historical Romance

PART TWO: ACHIEVEMENT AND FRUSTRATION
8. Clarissa in America: Toward Marjorie Morningstar
9. Good Good Girls and Good Bad Boys: Clarissa as a Juvenile
10. The Revenge on Women: From Lucy to Lolita
11. The Failure of Sentiment and the Evasion of Love
12. The Blackness of Darkness: Edgar Allan Poe and the Development of the Gothic
13. The Power of Blackness: Faustian Man and the Cult of Violence