jangling
09-29-2014, 06:08 PM
I am interested in finding examples of novels about a protagonist who moves from obscurity to prominence.
The following quote is from Adam Gopnik's April 21, 2014 New Yorker article "Go Giants" about classifying famous American literature.
Buell’s new idea is that the dream of the Great American Novel has resolved itself, invisibly, into four distinct and recurring “scripts.” The first script, he explains, derives from Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter,” and its essential quality is its adaptiveness, the way the book has lent itself to a “series of memorable imitations and reinventions.” But one might also add that the subject itself is “canonical”—the tale of sexual transgression and punishment in enclosed American communities is, after all, one that reaches from Hawthorne to such later candidates as Updike’s “Couples.” Then, there’s the “up-from” novel, which follows an aspirant as he or she rises from “obscurity to prominence” (“Invisible Man,” “The Adventures of Augie March”); the “romance of the divide,” which dramatizes a racial or geographic gap and the mostly failed attempts to bridge it (“Uncle Tom’s Cabin”; all of Faulkner); and, finally, the “compendious meganovel,” which may superficially resemble the Balzacian book but is more often a microcosm than a true cross-section—a bunch of guys on a boat hunting whales, a squadron of soldiers at war. (All the American types are there, but crowded in, not spaced out: the familiar platoon with the wise guy from Brooklyn, the towheaded boy from farm country, etc.)
Can you think of any other examples of the up-from novel?
The following quote is from Adam Gopnik's April 21, 2014 New Yorker article "Go Giants" about classifying famous American literature.
Buell’s new idea is that the dream of the Great American Novel has resolved itself, invisibly, into four distinct and recurring “scripts.” The first script, he explains, derives from Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter,” and its essential quality is its adaptiveness, the way the book has lent itself to a “series of memorable imitations and reinventions.” But one might also add that the subject itself is “canonical”—the tale of sexual transgression and punishment in enclosed American communities is, after all, one that reaches from Hawthorne to such later candidates as Updike’s “Couples.” Then, there’s the “up-from” novel, which follows an aspirant as he or she rises from “obscurity to prominence” (“Invisible Man,” “The Adventures of Augie March”); the “romance of the divide,” which dramatizes a racial or geographic gap and the mostly failed attempts to bridge it (“Uncle Tom’s Cabin”; all of Faulkner); and, finally, the “compendious meganovel,” which may superficially resemble the Balzacian book but is more often a microcosm than a true cross-section—a bunch of guys on a boat hunting whales, a squadron of soldiers at war. (All the American types are there, but crowded in, not spaced out: the familiar platoon with the wise guy from Brooklyn, the towheaded boy from farm country, etc.)
Can you think of any other examples of the up-from novel?