Bellow, Mailer, Baldwin, Malamud, Roth, Barth, Pynchon, Updike, Morrison, Kingston, Oates, and DeLillo, to name just a few. This list of American accomplishments in the novel does not begin to survey the remarkable artists of Canadian, Caribbean, and Latin American literature presented in the latter chapters of this history.
The inevitable limitation of any literary history is that there is never enough space for the inclusion of everyone or for the fullest treatment of those who are included. We regret that we could not provide chapters on every dimension of the novel or more analysis of -xvii- those we have included. We believe that what we do present will give our readers fresh, contemporary perspectives on the literary history of the 'American Novel.'
I would like to thank the associate editors and the contributors for the fine work they did for this volume. All of us involved in this book appreciate the important contributions of the excellent people at Columbia University Press. Once again, the President and Director of the Press, John D. Moore, provided the leadership and wisdom that enabled us to see it to completion. The Editorial Director of the Reference Division of the Press, James Raimes, initiated the idea for this book and oversaw the day-to-day progress of the work, and we benefited greatly from his insights, experience, patience, and understanding. James's fine assistant Frances Kim cheerfully and intelligently handled the myriad of details that crossed her desk. As always, William F. Bernhardt expertly edited the manuscripts with intelligence and tact. From the English Department of the University of California at Riverside, Stephanie Erickson and Deborah Hatheway composed the entries for the appendix of biographies of authors, and Deborah and Carlton Smith provided editorial assistance and suggestions for a number of the chapters. I am also grateful to the Faculty Senate of the University of California, Riverside, for general support and to my colleagues and the staff members of the English Department whose good will — and patience while waiting to use the copier — I genuinely appreciate. As always, my wife and university colleague, Georgia, contributed sound suggestions and warm encouragement, and my daughters Constance and Laura were indulgent of my frequent preoccupation.
Emory Elliott
-xviii-
Beginnings to the Mid-Nineteenth Century
Introduction
Critics, preachers, and other self-appointed moralists hated it; young men and women loved it. The novel was the subject of heated popular debate in the late eighteenth century and, in many ways, was to the early national period what television was to the 1950s or MTV and video games to the 1980s. It was condemned as escapist, anti-intellectual, violent, pornographic; since it was a 'fiction' it was a lie and therefore evil. Since it often portrayed characters of low social station and even lower morals — foreigners, orphans, fallen women, beggar girls, women cross-dressing as soldiers, soldiers acting as seducers — it fomented social unrest by making the lower classes dissatisfied with their lot. The novel ostensibly contributed to the demise of community values, the rise in licentiousness and illegitimacy, the failure of education, the disintegration of the family; in short, the ubiquity of the novel — augmented in the early nineteenth century by new printing, papermaking, and transportation technologies — most assuredly meant the decline of Western civilization as it had previously been known.
Predictably, running side by side with the sermons and newspaper editorials condemning the genre was a countering polemic in its favor. Other social commentators on the early novel claimed it was educational, nationalistic, populist, precisely what was required to bring together a nation recently fragmented by a Revolutionary War and further divided by the influx of immigrants in the postRevolutionary period, European immigrants who did not speak the same language, practice the same religion, or share the same values -3- as those earlier arrived on these native shores. By its linguistic simplicity, the novel was uniquely accessible to working-class readers and would introduce them to middle-class (and, presumably, WASP) values and manners. By its typical focus on women characters and its frequent addresses to women readers, it would help to erase the gender inequities built into the early American educational system. By its preoccupation with seduction as a theme, it would warn women that they had to be smart to survive. And even the early genre's suspect attachment to local scandal as a major source for its materials served a worthy end, for it warned men that their infamies could be broadcast to the community at large and that they could thus be held accountable for private sin in the court of public opinion.
What was the
The early contentious history of the novel in America anticipated in subtle and profound ways the debates, anxieties, and controversies about the genre during the nineteenth century, issues taken up in the chapters in the first section of this volume. Where, for example, is the boundary between the autobiography and the novel? The blurring of one into the other has a long history. That blurring also raises crucial theoretical and even political issues. As-told-to narratives, for example, contest the interrelated notions of 'authenticity,' 'authority,' and 'authorship.' An autobiography must be shaped and controlled and plotted in ways that resemble fiction, but the very concept of fictionality jeopardizes an authoritative 'I.' Which has more status, -4- novel or autobiography? Which has more cultural power? Questions of genre — especially when we address slave or Native American narratives — turn (as did discussions of the early novel) on questions of social truth and social power.
Authority and authorship also turn on questions of economic power. By the mid-nineteenth century, the 'novel' did not exist as any single entity. Popularity produces diversity, and soon there were many kinds of novels designed for a vaguely differentiated and overlapping audience — sensation novels, pulp romances, adventure stories, newspaper serials, reform novels. Some writers, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, even wanted to distinguish their 'romances' from the more prevalent but still partly suspect varieties of the novel.
Hawthorne's trepidation lest he be called a 'novelist' seems rooted in virtually all of the early American anxieties about the morality, factitiousness, accountability, moral purpose, and political function of the novel in society, anxieties arising (like Hawthorne's own) from a Puritan preoccupation with the practical social value of products of the imagination. Even Hawthorne's well-known uneasiness about fiction and gender, articulated throughout his life and his fiction in a variety of ways, seems to be a vestigial manifestation of the very first anxieties about the novel in America. The first two American best-sellers,
Did the novel forever alter America? Can a literary work really reform/re-form society? Can any cultural form effect social change? Or do cultural forms reflect those changes in progress? Agency, at one theoretical level or another, remains an issue in all discussions of the novel to date, just as it was in the first debates on the morality of fiction. So what else is new? Our fears and our hopes about the social potentialities of any new cultural phenomenon continue to inspire much the same debate (with the attendant tropes of apocalypse or redemption) that surrounded the emergence of the novel in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America.
Cathy N. Davidson
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