The American Novel to 1870

Book excerpt: The American Revolution and the Civil War bracket roughly eight decades of formative change in a republic created in 1776 by a gesture that was both rhetorical and performative. The subsequent construction of U.S. national identity influenced virtually all art forms, especially prose fiction, until internal conflict disrupted the project of nation-building. This volume reassesses, in an authoritative way, the principal forms and features of the emerging American novel. It will include chapters on: the beginnings of the novel in the US; the novel and nation-building; the publishing industry; leading novelists of Antebellum America; eminent early American novels; cultural influences on the novel; and subgenres within the novel form during this period. This book is the first of the three proposed US volumes that will make up Oxford's ambitious new twelve-volume literary resource, The Oxford History of the Novel in English (OHONE), a venture being commissioned and administered on both sides of the Atlantic.