The Columbia History of the American Novel

much scholarly debate.

For example, consider the titles of the two histories. Because the scope of the Columbia Literary History of the United States was so broad, the literature examined was limited to that which had been produced in the part of the world that has become the United States. Since the United States does not constitute all of 'America' — in spite of the common usage of the terms as synonymous — we did not use the term 'American' in the title. With the present work focusing upon only one genre, there was room to broaden the geographic scope and include chapters on Canadian, Caribbean, and Latin American fiction.

The desire to make the space for these chapters, however, has come from the growing internationalization of literature and the study of it during the past decade. Scholars throughout the world have come to appreciate more fully the extent to which the literature of our various American nations are intertwined. The texts of South America and North America are in dialogue with each other. Novelists of Africa and the Caribbean have a profound effect upon writers in the United States and are affected by them in return. The rapid maturation of the fairly new field of comparative literary study and increasing scholarly interactions and exchanges among those who study these various literatures have deepened our understandings of -xiii- these cultural connections and made it compelling to the editors of this book to be more internationally inclusive. As evidence of how writing done all over the world has become part of our own culture, a chapter on 'Colonialism, Imperialism, and Imagined Homes' rightly includes discussion of some figures who were neither born in nor lived in the Americas but whose works and experiences as novelists and public figures are a vital part of our larger literary culture.

Several other dimensions of this book spring from current critical attitudes. There are no chapters that are restricted to the fiction of women writers or of a particular racial or ethnic minority group. The works of women writers and of African American, Asian American, Chicano/a, and Jewish writers are taken up within chapters that address larger themes that are not limited by such categories. In 1982, the editors of the Columbia Literary History of the United States concluded, after extensive consultation with colleagues sensitive to the issues, that it was necessary to have specialists on women writers and on particular minority literatures write essays on those literatures because the large numbers of newly recognized writers of those groups were still not known to most critics who were nonspecialists. We wanted to be certain that the first collaborative literary history of the United States in forty years made the names and works of writers previously excluded from the canon better known so that other scholars and students could study their works. In this literary history we decided not to 'ghettoize' the novels of minority writers in order to underscore the impact of minority cultures upon American culture as a whole and to problematize the boundary between 'major' and 'minor' literatures.

Another way in which this book differs from its Columbia University Press predecessor is that it was not driven by a desire to be comprehensive or to have chapters on single authors that would signal our assertions of who is 'major' and who is 'minor.' There is clearly a chronological progression in the book with four historically organized sections introduced by a specialist in each period, but we did not make an attempt to 'cover' every novelist in every decade nor did we assign a certain number of pages to be given to each author according to our sense of an author's relative importance in the canon. We asked each contributor to write an informative chapter about the topic we assigned. We welcomed them to focus closely -xiv- upon authors whose work most engaged them as critics and to demonstrate for our readers how historical information and critical contexts of the various periods can inform readings of the fictional texts. Some critics chose to be quite inclusive and to provide brief treatments of many authors, while others use a few representative texts to examine complex literary phenomena more deeply, such as the conventions of late nineteenth-century realism. The number of times an author's name appears in the index or the number of pages of the entire volume given to an author's work is not an indication of an editorial decision to pay special attention to particular writers over others but instead to reflect the degree to which a highly diverse group of critics turned to particular works as examples of the development of the novel as a genre and as a reflection of changes in American society.

Because we have chosen a thematic rather than a biographical approach, the reader will not find a consistent presentation of what was once called the 'shape of the artist's career' unless one of our contributors happened to find a particular career illustrative of some larger cultural issues. To take the pressure of biography off our contributors and to provide the reader with a convenient summary of the lives and careers of the authors, we have provided an appendix of author biographies where such information is provided for a great many of the authors discussed in the text. For similar reasons, the chapters do not present references to other critical works about the literature through footnotes or parenthetical intrusions. However, those critics who are mentioned in the chapters can be found, along with many others, in the selected bibliography.

The major aim of this 'literary history' — a term that has as many definitions these days as there are definers — is to provide readers with lively and engaging discussions of the development of the novel in the Americas. Our emphasis, however, is upon the ways that current critical perspectives provide fresh insights into the texts and into the history of which the novels were and remain a part. For example, after an opening chapter that presents an overview of the emergence of the novel as an art form in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, there is a chapter that examines how the emergence of autobiography in early America, especially those written by slaves and by women, can be seen in relation to the narrative techniques of -xv- the novel. There are autobiographical fictions and fictional autobiographies, and this chapter examines the points of contact and divergence between these genres. Our next chapter surveys the book marketplace of the early nineteenth century and the impact of publishers and readers upon the development of the novel. Then, following a general chapter on the Romance form of the novel that explores the works of Hawthorne and Melville, there is a chapter entitled 'Romance and Race' that uses the example of Poe in particular to show how mythmaking in the Romance is subtly connected to the public rhetoric that attempted to present slavery as a benevolent institution.

Such a variation of approaches — standard survey treatments interwoven with probing studies of special subthemes — is designed to allow readers to see the multifaceted nature of the novel as a form and the highly complex circumstances that enable, impede, inspire, and restrict the artistic powers of novelists.

In order to alert readers to some of the thematic issues examined across the centuries, we have used roman numerals, as with Fiction and Reform I' and 'II, Popular Forms I' and 'II, and The Book Marketplace I' and 'II. The titles of other chapters indicate subjects for which there is continuity of treatment, such as in the case of race, region, and gender. In much literary theory and criticism of the 1980s, there has been more attention to and more sophisticated discussion of the work of lesbian and gay authors, and our chapters on 'Society and Identity' and 'Constructing Gender' especially reflect these recent trends.

Yet for all of our innovations in method and in the examination of new areas of fiction, this volume still tells an old story. That story is one that now begins with ancient oral narratives in the Middle East, in Africa, in Central Eurasia, in the Mediterranean, in Central China, in the forests and deserts of South America, and on the plains, along the rivers, and in the hills and mountains of North America. Some of these stories became powerful myths that became the cornerstones of great religions, that helped shape the destinies of peoples and civilizations, and that survived centuries to be echoed in poems and novels of today.

Once people of imagination began to write stories in that part of -xvi- North America that became the United States, they drew upon all of these heritages. African slaves told their ancestors' tales and heard those that descended through the families of Welsh, Scottish, Irish, and English settlers. French traders and Spanish explorers swapped stories with Native Americans who may have even memorized some from the Norse explorers centuries before. By the time the first 'American novel' was written, a long and complicated cultural history provided a rich resource for the imagination of the novelist.

Thus, it was only a matter of a few decades before novels began pouring off the American presses, and American writers from Irving and Cooper to Stowe, Alcott, Child, Hawthorne, and Melville were achieving success and receiving acclaim. By the latter decades of the nineteenth century, Henry James could challenge Balzac for the honor of being major novelist in the Western hemisphere, while James's contemporaries and those soon following after, such as Twain, Howells, Wharton, Crane, Dreiser, Norris, Chopin, Chesnutt, and Cather, were producing works of international recognition.

With the emergence of Anderson, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Stein in the 1920s, the world acknowledged that most of the consequential novelists and writers of the time were from the United States, even if many of them chose to live abroad. Others who wrote in that period would wait decades to attain proper recognition; among them were Hurston, Toomer, and Hughes. When the achievement of Faulkner came to be understood in the late 1940s and 1950s, the world again hailed the United States for having literary genius in its midst.

And so, too, since the mid-century, renowned artists of the novel have appeared: Wright, O'Connor, Ellison,