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Democratic Irony in the American Novel of Youth

出版	University of Dallas, 1997
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=tUB9NwAACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋"...Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Faulkner's Go Down, Moses (with special emphasis on Isaac McCaslin in 'The Bear'), and Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye give imaginative responses to the ongoing question concerning the nature of the individual in democratic society. These works are unified through the central action of each in which the adolescent individual, in seeking to affirm the values of an ideal democratic society, is ironically displaced due to the particular manifestation of the democratic character in American society. The youthful protagonist, for example, seeks the solace of community but discovers the nature of community to be problematic insofar as the democratic values of racial equality and personal freedom are perverted. In another example, where the leveling out of class distinction based upon ancestry is an apparent good of democratic society, these protagonists confront an American society where these distinctions are not abandoned but in fact are viciously retained, dislocated from their original context. These novels thus work rhetorically to present the protagonist as a figure opposing not only what had become the most pervasive characteristic of the American democracy--individualism--but also a host of other democratic values peculiar to the American brand of democracy, such as those de Tocqueville sees as separating man from man and turning him forever inward upon himself."--from the Introduction, pages 4-5.