Overview

The Oxford History of the Novel in English is a 12-volume series presenting a comprehensive, global, and up-to-date history of English-language prose fiction and written by a large, international team of scholars. The series is concerned with novels as a whole, not just the ""literary"" novel, and each volume includes chapters on the processes of production, distribution, and reception, and on popular fiction and the fictional sub-genres, as well as outlining the work of major novelists, movements, traditions, and tendencies.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.

Full Product Details

Author:   J. Gerald Kennedy (Boyd Professor, Boyd Professor, Louisiana State University) ,  Leland Person (Professor of English, Professor of English, Texas A&M University)
Publisher:   Oxford University Press Inc
Imprint:   Oxford University Press Inc
Volume:   5
Dimensions:   Width: 17.80cm , Height: 5.30cm , Length: 24.90cm
Weight:   1.256kg
ISBN:  

9780195385359

ISBN 10:   0195385357
Pages:   656
Publication Date:   07 August 2014
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   To order  
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Contributors General Editor's Preface Introduction: The American Novel to 1870 J. Gerald Kennedy and Leland S. Person Part I: The Beginnings of the Novel in the United States 1. Before the American Novel Betsy Erkkilä 2. The Sentimental Novel and the Seductions of Postcolonial 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 II: 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 III: 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 IV: 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 V: 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 VI: 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 G. Wilson 26. Ethnic Novels and the Construction of the Multicultural Nation to 1870 John Lowe 27. Women's Novels and the Gendering of Genius Renée 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 VII: Fictional Subgenres 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 of American Novelists to 1870 Index

Reviews

.. .readers should feel assured that this book represents an exceptionally and uniformly high level of scholarship. It provides a beautiful compendium of much of the best work that has come out of Americanist literary scholarship in the past two decades and, as such, should find a home on the shelf of every scholar of American literature and of the novel as a genre. --Thomas Allen, Eighteenth-Century Fiction

...readers should feel assured that this book represents an exceptionally and uniformly high level of scholarship. It provides a beautiful compendium of much of the best work that has come out of Americanist literary scholarship in the past two decades and, as such, should find a home on the shelf of every scholar of American literature and of the novel as a genre. --Thomas Allen, Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Author Information

J. Gerald Kennedy is Boyd Professor of English at Louisiana State University and author of Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing and Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity. He is the editor of the Oxford Historical Guide to Edgar Allan Poe. Leland S. Person is Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati. He is the author of Aesthetic Headaches: Women and a Masculine Poetics in Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne, Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity, and The Cambridge Introduction to Nathaniel Hawthorne.

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