| Sumario: | The early American novel has traditionally not received as much attention as contemporaneous writing in England and Europe. One reason for this relative lack of attention has been the continuing strength of mid-century claims that the models and familiar narrative for novel studies did not function well for an exceptional and purportedly classless America. Two recent studies, Joe Shapiro's The Illiberal Imagination: Class and the Rise of the U.S. Novel (2017) and Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse's Novels in the Time of Democratic Writing: The American Example (2018) challenge this prior common sense by providing new approaches and methods to the long fiction written in the US in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Shapiro argues that early American novels were preoccupied by questions of class differences, and that different generic modes were chosen to cover a spectrum of positions that sought to downplay democratic urges by the labouring class. Armstrong and Tennenhouse use network theory to claim, conversely, that the early American novel's preferred themes were meant to enable a democracy that could not occur in Great Britain. The divergent claims of these two monographs establish a new debate over how American studies should consider the antebellum novel.
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