Research Catalog

Title

The American novel to 1870 / edited by J. Gerald Kennedy and Leland S. Person.

Publication

New York : Oxford University Press, [2014]

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

• Kennedy, J. Gerald
• Person, Leland S.

Description

xiv, 640 pages : illustrations; 26 cm

Summary

In thirty-four essays, this volume reconstructs the emergence and early cultivation of the novel in the United States. Contributors discuss precursors to the U.S. novel that appeared as colonial histories, autobiographies, diaries, and narratives of Indian captivity, religious conversion, and slavery, while paying attention to the entangled literary relations that gave way to a distinctly American cultural identity. The Puritan past, more than two centuries of Indian wars, the American Revolution, and the exploration of the West all inspired fictions of American struggle and self-discovery. A fragmented national publishing landscape comprised of small, local presses often disseminating odd, experimental forms eventually gave rise to major houses in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia and a consequently robust culture of letters. Dime novels, literary magazines, innovative print technology, and even favorable postal rates contributed to the burgeoning domestic book trade in place by the time of the Missouri Compromise. Contributors weigh novelists of this period alongside their most enduring fictional works to reveal how even the most "American" of novels sometimes confronted the inhuman practices upon which the promise of the new republic had been made to depend. Similarly, the volume also looks at efforts made to extend American interests into the wider world beyond the nation's borders, and it thoroughly documents the emergence of novels projecting those imperial aspirations.

Series Statement

The Oxford history of the novel in English ; volume 5

Uniform Title

Oxford history of the novel in English ; v. 5.

Subjects

• Literature and society
• American fiction
• American fiction > 18th century > History and criticism
• Literature and society > United States > History > 19th century
• Social conflict in literature
• National characteristics, American, in literature
• American literature > European influences
• Literature and society > United States > History > 18th century
• Criticism, interpretation, etc
• 1700-1899
• History
• American fiction > 19th century > History and criticism
• United States

Genre/Form

• Criticism, interpretation, etc.
• History.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (pages 579-615) and indexes.

Contents

Before the American novel / Betsy Erkkila -- The sentimental novel and the seduction of postcolonial imitation / Karen A. Weyler -- Complementary strangers : Charles Brockden Brown, Susanna Rowson, and the Early American Sentimental Gothic / Marion Rust -- Trends and patterns in the US novel, 1800-1820 / Ed White -- Unsettling novels of the early Republic / Leonard Tennenhouse -- Walter Scott and the American Historical Novel / Fiona Robertson -- Revolutionary novels and the problem of literary nationalism / Joseph J. Letter -- Frontier novels, border wards, and Indian removal / Dana D. Nelson -- America's Europe : Irving, Poe, and the foreign subject / J. Gerald Kennedy -- Publishers, booksellers, and the literary market / Michael Winship -- The perils of authorship : literary property and nineteenth-century American fiction / Lara Langer Cohen and Meredith L. McGill -- Periodicals and the novel / Patricia Okker -- Cheap sensation : pamphlet potboilers and Beadle's dime novels / Shelley Streeby -- James Fenimore Cooper : beyond leather-stocking / Wayne Franklin -- Catharine Maria Sedgwick : domestic and national narratives / James L. Machor -- Hawthorne and the historical romance / Larry J. Reynolds -- Herman Melville / Jonathan Arac -- Harriet Beecher Stowe and the antislavery cause / John Ernest -- The Last of the Mohicans : race to citizenship / Leland S. Person -- The Scarlet Letter / Monika Elbert -- Moby-Dick and globalization / John Carlos Rowe -- Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin / David S. Reynolds -- Transatlantic currents and postcolonial anxieties / Paul Giles -- The Transamerican novel / Anna Brickhouse -- Slavery, abolitionism, and the African American novel / Ivy G. Wilson -- Ethnic novels and the construction of the multicultural nation to 1870 / John Lowe -- Women's novels and the gendering of genius / Renée Bergland -- Make hybrids in classic American fiction / David Leverenz -- Studying nature in the antebellum novel / Timothy Sweet -- Novels of faith and doubt in a changing culture / Caroline Levander -- Temperance novels and morel reform / Debra J. Rosenthal -- Novels of travel and exploration / Gretchen Murphy -- The city mystery novel / Scott Peeples -- Surviving national disunion : Civil War novels of the 1860s / Paul Christian Jones.

Call Number

JFF 16-701

ISBN

• 9780195385359
• 0195385357

LCCN

2013033712

OCLC

894476243

Title

The American novel to 1870 / edited by J. Gerald Kennedy and Leland S. Person.

Publisher

New York : Oxford University Press, [2014]

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Series

The Oxford history of the novel in English ; volume 5

Oxford history of the novel in English ; v. 5.

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references (pages 579-615) and indexes.

Chronological Term

1700-1899

Added Author

Kennedy, J. Gerald, editor.

Person, Leland S., editor.

Research Call Number

JFF 16-701