The American novel to 1870

The American Revolution and the Civil War bracket roughly eight decades of formative change in a republic created in 1776 by a gesture that was both rhetorical and performative. The subsequent construction of U.S. national identity influenced virtually all art forms, especially prose fiction, until internal conflict disrupted the project of nation-building. This volume reassesses, in an authoritative way, the principal forms and features of the emerging American novel. It will include chapters on: the beginnings of the novel in the US; the novel and nation-building; the publishing industry; leading novelists of Antebellum America; eminent early American novels; cultural influences on the novel; and subgenres within the novel form during this period. This book is the first of the three proposed US volumes that will make up Oxford's ambitious new eleven-volume literary resource, The Oxford History of the Novel in English (OHONE), a venture being commissioned and administered on both sides of the Atlantic.

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Accounts of the history of the American novel before the Civil War usually focus on authors of the American Renaissance, with supplementary discussion of the preceding writers in the sentimental tradition. For many readers, the American novel is defined as a sustained fictional work set in the colonies or the US, addressing an American subject or theme, and written by someone born in the US. The scope of the 34 essays Kennedy (Louisana State Univ.) and Person (Univ. of Cincinnati) collect here is more varied and comprehensive. Multiple essays trace authorial careers that reflect patterns of reading and circulation within a transatlantic or global context. When relevant, essays illuminate contested social and political issues: Indian removal, race, female suffrage, nationalism, and westward expansion. Contributors are sensitive to the sometimes uncertain line between the genres of fiction and nonfiction. Several informative entries explore specialized genres: temperance fiction, narratives of exploration, ethnically oriented novels, city mystery novels. Although a few novels of secondary importance are overlooked, this collection should prove to be a valuable resource for reference as well as interpretation. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Kent P. Ljungquist, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

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