Episode 29: Rallying Around the Flag in Stephen Crane's THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE

The Red Badge of Courage (1895) is a singularly unique war novel: whereas most depictions of the horrors of combat and the trauma of the battlefield are naturalistic, attempting to inflict upon the reader the violence the prose describes and terrifying us with the prospect that humans do not rise to heroic occasions, Stephen Crane's novel is impressionistic, blurring detail at the edges and giving scattershot glimpses of confusion, guilt, regret, and even envy and resentment. Through the stor...

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Few literary terms are more hotly debated, discounted, or derided than the "Great American Novel." But while critics routinely dismiss the phrase as at best hype and as at worst exclusionary, the belief that a national literature commensurate with both the scope and the contradictions of being American persists. In this podcast Scott Yarbrough and Kirk Curnutt examine totemic works such as Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and Toni Morrison's Beloved that have been labeled GANs, exploring their themes, forms, and reception histories, asking why, when, and how they entered the literary canon. Readers beware: there be spoilers here, and other hijinks ensue...