ISBN : 9780195385359
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
"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