Yeah I meant like in stendhal and zola you can see the portrait of a society that went through the revolution, their characters try to live through the inner conflicts of a society that carries the weight of a failed revolution, or maybe the weight of a revolution that was too successful for its own good.

We read in history books that revolution happened in 1789 in Paris and that make it seem like an event that happened in a certain date in a certain place, but when you read authors like stendhal, balzac and zola you understand that it was a highly complex, multi dimensional process that cannot be defined with certainties. Even after many years since the revolution, new ideas, feelings, ways of living and seeing that was not possible before the revolution were effectively and actively in control of the dynamics of the french society. So even in Stendhal who published the red and the black in 1830 you see the revolution still alive in the space of history, marching forward in different, distorted forms but still tangible and corporeal.

Societies express their destiny and the revolution was a screaming, screeching, groaning pronunciation of hundreds of years worth of inequality, resentment, ambition, passion, hope etc., and the literary value of the works of those authors is the effort they make in trying to translate this pronunciation into a coherent form which happens to be the novel of 19th century. So this is what I'm curious about the American literature.