A Companion to American Fiction, 1780 - 1865

by Samuels, Shirley

• ISBN13: 9781405158916
• ISBN10: 1405158913
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-11-10
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

This Companion presents the current state of criticism in the field of American fiction from the earliest declarations of nationhood to secession and civil war. Draws heavily on historical and cultural contexts in its consideration of American fiction Relates the fiction of the period to conflicts about territory and sovereignty and to issues of gender, race, ethnicity and identity Covers different forms of fiction, including children's literature, sketches, polemical pieces, historical romances, Gothic novels and novels of exploration Considers both canonical and lesser-known authors, including James Fennimore Cooper, Hannah Foster, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Harriet Beecher Stowe Treats neglected topics, such as the Western novel, science and the novel, and American fiction in languages other than English

Author Biography

Shirley Samuels is Professor of English and American Studies at Cornell University. She is the author of Romances of the Republic (1996) and Facing America: Iconography and the Civil War (2004), and the editor of The Culture of Sentiment (1992). She is also currently the section editor of "American Literature before 1865" for the Blackwell online www.literature-compass.com.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. viii
Notes on Contributors	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xvi
Introduction	p. 1
Historical and Cultural Contexts	p. 5
National Narrative and the Problem of American Nationhood	p. 7
Fiction and Democracy	p. 20
Democratic Fictions	p. 31
Engendering American Fictions	p. 40
Race and Ethnicity	p. 52
Class	p. 64
Sexualities	p. 75
Religion	p. 87
Education and Polemic	p. 97
Marriage and Contract	p. 108
Transatlantic Ventures	p. 119
Other Languages, Other Americas	p. 131
Forms of Fiction	p. 145
Literary Histories	p. 147
Breeding and Reading: Chesterfieldian Civility in the Early Republic	p. 158
The American Gothic	p. 168
Sensational Fiction	p. 179
Melodrama and American Fiction	p. 191
Delicate Boundaries: Passing and Other "Crossings" in Fictionalized Slave Narratives	p. 204
Doctors, Bodies, and Fiction	p. 216
Law and the American Novel	p. 228
Labor and Fiction	p. 239
Words for Children	p. 249
Dime Novels	p. 262
Reform and Antebellum Fiction	p. 274
Authors, Locations, Purposes	p. 285
The Problem of the City	p. 287
New Landscapes	p. 301
The Gothic Meets Sensation: Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, George Lippard, and E. D. E. N. Southworth	p. 314
Retold Legends: Washington Irving, James Kirke Paulding, and John Pendleton Kennedy	p. 330
Captivity and Freedom: Ann Eliza Bleecker, Harriet Prescott Spofford, and Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle"	p. 342
New England Tales: Catharine Sedgwick, Catherine Brown, and the Dislocations of Indian Land	p. 353
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Caroline Lee Hentz, Herman Melville, and American Racialist Exceptionalism	p. 365
Fictions of the South: Southern Portraits of Slavery	p. 378
The West	p. 388
The Old Southwest: Mike Fink, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Johnson Jones Hooper, and George Washington Harris	p. 400
James Fenimore Cooper and the Invention of the American Novel	p. 411
The Sea: Herman Melville and Moby-Dick	p. 425
National Narrative and National History	p. 434
Index	p. 445
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