Liberalism and the Early American Novel.
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...
| Published in: | American Literary History Vol. 30; no. 4; pp. 777 - 788 |
|---|---|
| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Published: |
Oxford University Press / USA
Winter2018
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | View this record in EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=133186483&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 133186483 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 08967148 7IY jtl: American Literary History issn: 08967148 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Winter2018 vid: 30 iid: 4 pid: 622 pub: Oxford University Press / USA artinfo: ui: 133186483 10.1093/alh/ajy031 ppf: 777 ppct: 11 formats: tig: atl: Liberalism and the Early American Novel. aug: au: Shapiro, Stephen su: Liberalism American literature Literary criticism Illiberal Imagination: Class & the Rise of the U.S. Novel, The (Book) Novels in the Time of Democratic Writing: The American Example (Book) Class differences in literature Democracy Eighteenth century sug: subj: Liberalism American literature Literary criticism Illiberal Imagination: Class & the Rise of the U.S. Novel, The (Book) Novels in the Time of Democratic Writing: The American Example (Book) Class differences in literature Democracy Eighteenth century ab: 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. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y dt: @attributes: year: 2018 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
|---|