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C O N C L U S I O N For some readers, the history of the American novel will always be one of its formal changes—from Cooper, through Hawthorne and Melville, to James and onward through Hemingway and Faulkner, on through the early postmodernists , culminating in Pynchon or DeLillo or Morrison. At various points, for these readers, lesser lights will have something to add. The pleasures of reading American novels this way are patent, but the enthusiasm for studying the novel’s formal changes—up to and out of realism—does not admit of the kind of pleasure that middle-class fiction a√ords, the complex appeal, not of form, but of modern social history. Perhaps readers who so choose should be left alone with these linguistic artifacts, many of which are so fully realized that they will stand, deservedly, for a very long time in the annals of fiction. Other readers care less for form and want to read American novels in terms of their potential for change—and these readers will examine fiction for its power to imagine a world beyond the one in which the middle class resides and maybe presides. The struggle of the comfortable classes to remain comfortable, despite the ruptures and vagaries of history, admits of little heroism to such readers, though, as I hope to have shown, that struggle in its fullest proportions seems even epic, insofar as it commands the perspective of America envisioning what the country has become. My study of middle-class fiction, in part, has asked that scholars and readers turn to novels they may never have heard about in order to gain a clearer understanding of the unfolding shape of American literary and cultural history. Readers need not give up their preference for Hurston or Hemingway, but they might seek a richer understanding of the historical { 330 } CONCLUSION and social milieu in which these writers wrote, a context that is significantly distorted if the centrifugal powers of middle-class conditions of production, circulation, and reception are not acknowledged or understood. Once readers do that, they will see that middle-class fiction accommodates a whole range of novels, at least as much as any other category can define. Middleclass novels, I have tried to show, help us to organize ways of seeing the variegations and patterns of American cultural history; their nearly total absence from scholarly discussion expresses nothing less than their suppressed centrality to the nation’s literary heritage. What should we do with this knowledge? Students need not go about reading these books closely, validating some for further study and eliminating others, in order to establish a countercanon. My point is not to engineer some shift in the object of academic inquiry—away from the traditional works of modernist or postmodernist formal invention and toward realist convention, or away from proletarian or multicultural writing and toward the bourgeoisie. Instead, my hope is that these books will emerge in all their complementarity and supplementarity, wherein lies what may be their full power of distinction and contradistinction. Studying middle-class fiction should help us to see more clearly the accomplishments of the novelists we do cherish, though it will be gratifying if other scholars find in the many titles I have named works that they can use for the production of deeper cultural knowledge and historical awareness. These books, I have argued throughout, are part of our literary environment and cultural milieu; a history that ignores their place is partial and necessarily distorted. In that sense, it is bad history and needs to be corrected. But how would a new history take shape? I would discourage a student from writing a dissertation, for example, on three or four of these writers, or seven or eight, for several reasons: primarily, these individual writers are not important because they have been forgotten; they are important because they have been forgotten as a group, one that wrote not just for an implied class of readers, but the general audience for serious fiction. Yet the books that they have left behind need not be relegated so peremptorily as they have been. Instead, I see everything to be gained from bringing these works to bear on some analysis of a single text by any preferred writer, so that these forgotten novels may qualify and contextualize better-known works. For instance, I have suggested at various places that novels of immigration remain popular through much of the period of this study...

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