Maria Konnikova points to the aftermath of the Civil War and the resulting search for renewed national identity. She deploys "the minimal group paradigm" to make her argument, "a concept that basically says exactly what it is: a way of creating groups, and cohesive groups at that, by using something as minimal as possible to tie them together":
Is it a coincidence that the concept of the [Great American Novel or GAN] was born in 1868, just a few years after the American Civil War—or is there something more to the timing? The GAN had no precedent. There wasn’t a history of Great National Novels, with capital letters, of one Great Work to unite a country. Plenty of great works had been written and acknowledged as such, but there had never been a rush to crown one of them the defining work of the nation that birthed it, for all time and all people. In that sense, the GAN was a first.
And think how clever was the choice of unifying matter: this group paradigm (for that, I would argue, is precisely what it was) wasn’t created on a point of contention, on anything that could reignite the old bitterness or enmity, anything that could serve as a reminder of national divisions. Instead, it was about culture, it was about literature, it was about overall national greatness of pen and spirit, a greatness that would define the country and set it apart from the rest of the world.
The Dish 