analysis of romantic-realism in Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead"

Despite its vast and ongoing public appeal, Ayn Rand's fiction has received scant critical attention regarding its literary techniques. Such an analysis of one of her works, The Fountainhead, which focuses on the four literary attributes of the conventional novel form, reveals her deliberate weaving of romanticism and realism to create her own genre: romantic-realism. After a broad discussion of the genre itself, which also demonstrates Rand's early literary influences, each of these attributes (plot, characterization, style, and theme) is examined separately. In each case, those specific literary techniques generally acknowledged as being common to primarily one or the other genre (by various critics whom I cite and then by Rand herself) are noted first, whereupon follows a discussion of how these techniques are utilized in The Fountainhead. Finally, I suggest possible non-literary reasons for the frequent negative reactions to the novel and acknowledge Rand's influence on a few specific modern writers.