Michaud, Régis
"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 Fr…
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