The Classical Tradition in Modern American Fiction by Tessa Roynon (review)

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• The Classical Tradition in Modern American Fiction by Tessa Roynon
• Patrice Rankine

Tessa Roynon. The Classical Tradition in Modern American Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2021. 296 pp. $35.95.

The quest for the Great American Novel was a constant literary trope and a heroic personal pursuit for many writers across the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, perhaps only avid readers of fiction wonder about the novel’s galvanizing role in culture, its ability to make a nation, as Benedict Anderson (1983) had it. The imagined community now consumes on the big screen literary masterpieces of our own and bygone eras, like Homer’s Iliad or Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Titles like The Great Gatsby become blockbuster movies or television miniseries. For the more perspicacious student and scholar willing to diverge from the beaten path to understand points of origination and particular nuances, Tessa Roynon offers a roadmap, a comprehensive treatment of classics and classical reception in some of the most important American novels of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The study navigates through nineteen Great Books (a category the author dates to 1943 and the Britannica series), the one outlier being the unfinished, posthumous work of Ralph Ellison, Three Days Before the Shooting. .., which Roynon rightly hesitates to call a novel. The seven Great American writers included in the study (a chapter dedicated to each) are: Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, and Marilynne Robinson.

Classical myth, literature (preferably in the Greek and Latin original), and the artifacts of ancient Greece and Rome amount to a kind of Holy Grail on the journey to the Great American Novel, promised ends for readers and writers alike. Roynon asks “why so much modern, postmodern, and/or contemporary US fiction, occupying every position on the realist-toexperimentalist spectrum, makes such varied and extensive use of classical Greek and Roman tradition” (1-2). Since the writers hold fast to the classics and their reception—Greek and Roman, and secondarily, those within the broader Great Books framework—Roynon does as well. Her approach, however, is in notable ways different from her forebears’. One of the new and improved sensibilities in Roynon’s book is her heightened attention to efforts within the United States and across the professional field of Classical [End Page 248] Reception studies, globally, to diversify the canon of literary authors. For example, alongside the well-trodden theoretical study of classics and classical reception, owing to decades of research in the field, Roynon can now conscript into her array of critical tools such subdisciplines as “black classicism” (11), the Encyclopedia Africana appellation that classicist Michele Ronnick gave in the mid-2000s to an emerging spectrum of writers, artists, and scholars interested in African, transatlantic approaches the field and its influences. In full disclosure, I am one of those scholars. To this array, Roynon adds her own nuanced understanding throughout, coupling academic discipline and subdiscipline with deep readings of the writers and their worlds.

The range of novelists that Roynon covers is a strength of the book. For example, she pairs Paradise as a travel companion to Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses and Absalom, Absalom!, with Morrison’s novels alluding to and benefiting from an understanding of her forebear. Roynon’s wide berth is fitting for survey classes in secondary and tertiary settings, particularly but not exclusively in the American context. As with other political considerations during the period of production that Roynon covers, race is always a factor, given its salience in cultural discourse within the United States, but certainly also given its robustness beyond its borders. This is the case whether the writers know it or not, as Morrison postulated in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992). These foci of race and the classics are ones that Roynon understands well, even if she pans out studiously to be inclusive of broader concerns.

Roynon’s careful navigation of the terrain brings much success. Although, as she recognizes from the outset, there is no “unifying formula or paradigm” for her book (4), several themes and commitments consolidate toward a comprehensive contribution to the field of study. She...