Fielder, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Criterion, 1960.*

That Bonds-star up there is to indicate I didn't actually Finish! this book—not all of it, at least. But if anyone important asks, I read every word.

At any rate, this is one of the most famous studies of the American novel, which Fiedler argues (looking most closely at Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain) is built on a foundation of sentimentality and escape. "[T]he typical male protagonist of our fiction has been the man on the run," he writes, "[. . .] anywhere to avoid 'civilization,' which is to say, the confrontation of a man and a woman which leads to the fall to sex, marriage and responsibility" (xx-xxi). As a result, one of the central tropes of U.S. literature is the image where "a white and a colored American male flee from civilization in each other's arms" (x).

Fiedler's analysis is very broad, going back to the beginnings of the novel in Richardson and Scott. Despite his central theory of comrades in arms, Fiedler's text doesn't lend itself much to the world of queer theory. He does a smart queering of The Scarlet Letter, in which Chillingworth becomes a seducer and dominant partner of Dimmesdale's. But queer literature in itself is written off as an inauthentic version of the southern gothic—Jamesian sensibility infesting Faulknerian terror. Capote's promise, Fiedler says, was "frittered away" by journalism and his own love of celebrity.