THE FAMILY CHRONICLE AND MODERN AMERICA

Since 1943, the year Wallace Stegner\u27s The Big Rock Candy Mountain was published, the family chronicle has been a form of the novel in which serious American novelists of diverse backgrounds and literary intentions have created works of singular merit and distinction. The family chronicle is a narrative which grants sincere, extended attention, not just to the most recent generation of a fictional family, but also (and not necessarily chronologically) to one or more of the antecedent generations of that family. The family chronicle stratifies time in an almost geological fashion, generation by generation, and this stratification becomes both its structural device and its method of discovering whatever meaning lies folded away in its characters\u27 lies. D. H. Lawrence\u27s The Rainbow enunciates most clearly among early family chronicles the three major thematic concerns shared by the American novels treated in this dissertation: a conservative valuation of the family; the quest for an identity suited to the moral, spiritual, and social exigencies of modern living; and an ethical critique of the consumeristic materialism and/or social depersonalization of our society. These themes are vitally interrelated: the ethical critique demands the quest for an identity, and that quest is resolved within the matrix of the family. Individual chapters are devoted to Stegner\u27s The Big Rock Candy Mountain, John Cheever\u27s The Wapshot Chronicle and The Wapshot Scandal, Larry Woiwode\u27s Beyond the Bedroom Wall, Frederick Manfred\u27s Green Earth, and Toni Morrison\u27s Song of Solomon. The considerations that have operated in the selection of these six novels are: that their essential time frame be limited to the twentieth century; that they be American (since the form has flourished most strikingly in post-Depression America); and that as works of literature, they have more than a purely popular appeal