Full Description
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
Contents
"Introduction: The American Novel to 1870," J. Gerald Kennedy and Leland S. Person ; Part 1: The Beginnings of the Novel in the United States ; 1. "Before the American Novel," Betsy Erkkila ; 2. "The Sentimental Novel and the Seductions of Post-Colonial Imitation," Karen A. Weyler ; 3. "Complementary Strangers: Charles Brockden Brown, Susanna Rowson, and the Early American Sentimental Gothic," Marion Rust ; 4. "Trends and Patterns in the US Novel, 1800-1820," Ed White ; 5. "Unsettling Novels of the Early Republic," Leonard Tennenhouse ; Part 2: The Novel and American Nation-building ; 6. "Walter Scott and the American Historical Novel," Fiona Robertson ; 7. "Revolutionary Novels and the Problem of Literary Nationalism," Joseph J. Letter ; 8. "Frontier Novels, Border Wars, and Indian Removal," Dana D. Nelson ; 9. "America's Europe: Irving, Poe, and the 'Foreign Subject,'" J. Gerald Kennedy ; Part 3: The American Publishing World and the Novel ; 10. "Publishers, Booksellers, and the Literary Market," Michael Winship ; 11. "The Perils of Authorship: Literary Property and Nineteenth-Century American Fiction," Lara Langer Cohen and Meredith L. McGill ; 12. "Periodicals and the Novel," Patricia Okker ; 13. "Cheap Sensation: Pamphlet Potboilers and Beadle's Dime Novels," Shelley Streeby ; Part 4: Leading Novelists of Antebellum America ; 14. "James Fenimore Cooper: Beyond Leather-Stocking," Wayne Franklin ; 15. "Catharine Maria Sedgwick: Domestic and National Narratives," James L. Machor ; 16. "Hawthorne and the Historical Romance," Larry J. Reynolds ; 17. "Herman Melville," Jonathan Arac ; 18. "Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Antislavery Cause," John Ernest ; Part 5: Major Novels ; 19. "The Last of the Mohicans: Race to Citizenship," Leland S. Person ; 20. "The Scarlet Letter," Monika Elbert ; 21. "Moby-Dick and Globalization," John Carlos Rowe ; 22. "Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin," David S. Reynolds ; Part 6: Cultural Influences on the American Novel, 1820-1870 ; 23. "Transatlantic Currents and Postcolonial Anxieties," Paul Giles ; 24. "The Transamerican Novel," Anna Brickhouse ; 25. "Slavery, Abolitionism, and the African American Novel," Ivy Wilson ; 26. "Ethnic Novels and the Construction of the Multicultural Nation to 1870," John Lowe ; 27. "Women's Novels and the Gendering of Genius," Renee Bergland ; 28. "Male Hybrids in Classic American Fiction," David Leverenz ; 29. "Studying Nature in the Antebellum Novel," Timothy Sweet ; 30. "Novels of Faith and Doubt in a Changing Culture," Caroline Levander ; Part 7: Fictional Sub-genres ; 31. "Temperance Novels and Moral Reform," Debra J. Rosenthal ; 32. "Novels of Travel and Exploration," Gretchen Murphy ; 33. "The City Mystery Novel," Scott Peeples ; 34. "Surviving National Disunion: Civil War Novels of the 1860s," Paul Christian Jones ; Composite Bibliography ; Index
