The Old World Journey National Identity in Four American Novels from 1960 to 1973

Sammanfattning: A commonly held assumption among literary critics is that the motif of the European journey is exhausted in American literature in the post-World-War-II period. Challenging this view, the present study claims that the Old World journey narrative lives on, but in new guises, and that it continues to be a forum for the discussion of American national identity. Studying four novels about Americans traveling to Europe – William Styron’s Set This House on Fire (1960), Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America (1971), John A. Williams’s The Man Who Cried I Am (1967) and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973) – this thesis examines the ways in which the European journey is utilized for a questioning of “America.” Informed by the political debates of their time, which lead, for example, to the displacement of hegemonic ideologies such as nationalism, they share a critical stance vis-à-vis the conventional construction of national identity. They represent, however, different strands of the contemporary political counterculture; while the first two texts view national identity from the center of American society, addressing a moral and an ideological/intellectual critique, respectively, the last two represent marginal perspectives, that of the African American and feminist protest movements. The function of the European setting in the four novels is also scrutinized: in all of them the European setting provides the backdrop for a story that deals, almost exclusively, with American culture; it serves in a variety of ways, for example as a many-facetted stage, an experimental ground, or a zone of liberation. The Coda sketches recent developments in the 1980s and 1990s, finding the motif of initiation and the figure of the independent warm-hearted American girl to persist and the myth of American innocence to continue to be contested.