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001			78461
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005			20260610134823.0
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007			cr n
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040			_aUtSlPG
041		7	_aen _2iso639-1
050		4	_aPS
100	1		_aMichaud, Régis, _d1880-1939
245	1	4	_aThe American novel to-day
264		1	_aSalt Lake City, UT : _bProject Gutenberg, _c2026
300			_a1 online resource : _bmultiple file formats
336			_atext _btxt _2rdacontent
337			_acomputer _bc _2rdamedia
338			_aonline resource _bcr _2rdacarrier
500			_aRelease date is 2026-04-16
508			_aSean (@parchmentglow)
520			_a"The American novel to-day" by Régis Michaud is a work of literary criticism written in the early 20th century. It offers a social and psychological reading of modern American fiction, arguing that contemporary novels form a realist, often pessimistic critique of American civilization shaped by Puritan legacies and illuminated by new psychology, especially Freud. The study surveys major writers and trends to show how individual desire, repression, and social pressure drive American storytelling. The opening of the book explains its origin in Sorbonne lectures and its limited aim: not a full history, but a focused inquiry into how contemporary American novels satirize society and defend individual rights. Michaud frames the field through realism’s rise and the spread of psychoanalysis, portraying Puritanism as a powerful source of inhibition behind America’s paradox of mass prosperity and private discontent, and he contrasts an embattled elite with the mass mind. He then assembles the “case against the Puritans” via critics like Waldo Frank (Puritan repression and expansionism), H. L. Mencken (moral policing and respectability), and Theodore Dreiser (cultural barrenness under Puritan constraint), alongside psychologists who diagnose repression, “floating anxiety,” and a pervasive “mother complex” in American life. Next he sketches the intellectual toolkit for his readings—William James’s stream of consciousness and multiple “selves,” behaviorism’s stimulus–response lens, and Freudian psychoanalysis—before applying it to Hawthorne, recasting The Scarlet Letter as a drama of inhibition and release: Hester’s unapologetic passion, Dimmesdale’s crippling repression, and Chillingworth’s probing as a kind of proto-psychoanalysis, with confession as cure. The narrative then turns to Henry James (exile to Europe, “undervitality” and inhibition in Americans), Edith Wharton (precise society novels that indict respectability and expose shallow behaviorism in love and morals), and begins a portrait of William Dean Howells as a genial realist of ordinary life. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
534			_pOriginally published: _cBoston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1928
653			_aAmerican fiction -- History and criticism
653			_aPsychological fiction, American -- History and criticism
653			_aSocial problems in literature
856	4		_uhttps://archive.org/details/americannoveltod0000mich/page/n7/mode/2up
856	4	0	_uhttps://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78461
999			_c119180 _d119180