Enter the Novel: American Fiction in the Eighteenth- and EarlyNineteenth Centuries

English 516 Dr. Roggenkamp

Image: A Young Girl Reading, Jean Honor Fragonard, 1796

Warning: Novels can be hazardous to your health!

A great obstacle to good education is the inordinate passion prevalent for novels, and the time lost in that reading which should be instructively employed. When this poison infects the mind, it destroys its tone and revolts it against wholesome reading. Reading and fact, plain and unadorned, are rejected. Nothing can engage attention unless dressed in all the figments of fancy . . . . The result is a bloated imagination, sickly judgment, and disgust towards all the real business of life. -- Thomas Jefferson

Novel reading today, licentious riot and senseless revolution tomorrow

(Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word)

I have heard it said in favour of novels that there are many good sentiments dispersed in them. I maintain, that good sentiments being found scattered in loose novels, render them the more dangerous, since, when they are mixed with seducing arguments, it requires more discernment . . . And when a young lady finds principles of religion and virtue inculcated in a book, she is naturally thrown off her guard by taking it for granted that such a work can contain no harm: and of course the evil steals imperceptibly into her heart. -- Weekly Magazine, 1798

Novel Reading, a Cause of Female Depravity (1802 jeremiad)

The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth; and prevented others from improving their minds in useful knowledge. . . . Parents take care to feed their children with wholesome diet; and yet how unconcerned about the provision for the mind . . . . How many thousands have, by a free use of such books, corrupted their principles, inflamed their imagination, and vitiated their taste . . . . -- Reverend Enos Hitchcock, 1790

Why all the fuss?

Puritanical roots of New England publishing Fear of changing conditions in terms of gender, society, economic class, politics Rise of a middle- to lower-class readership: novel a genre deliberately aimed not at the gentry but at Americans who often did not read other kinds of books (Davidson) Replace authority of intellectual eliteand authority of the sermon Female readers who lack male guidance A cultural revolution seen in growth of novel

Changes in the business of shaping the literary landscape

Novel invented (arguably) in mid 18th century, Europe First English novel (perhaps): Samuel Richardsons Pamela Before then: novelistic stuff in crime stories, chapbooks, ballads, newspapersalso captivity narratives, execution sermons, etc. Novelnouvellewhats new, meaning a new genre, but also whats new in societynarrative about contemporary concerns

Novels in America
Americans DID read novels, though they were so universally frowned upon by cultural critics Imports, almost exclusively, until 19th century A TRANSATLANTIC reading culture Piracy: no federal copyright law until 1790; no firm international copyright law until 1890 First novel published by American: The Power of Sympathy, William Hill Brown (1789) Charles Brockden Brown Americas first really serious novelist

Early Novel Sub-Genres

Picaresque: novel of epic (or mock epic) scale; gallery of character types, including lower-class protagonist who survives by guile or trickery; parody of chivalric romance (The Algerine Captive, 1797; Candide, 1759) Sentimental novel or novel of sensibility: novel of manners, of women in more cultured settingsoften involving seduction plot (and often epistolary in nature) (Jane Austens works; Charlotte Temple, 1790; The Coquette, 1797; The Power of Sympathy, 1789)
Image: Engraving from 1778 edition of Voltaires Candide

Types of Novels in Early America

Gothic: Supernatural (or apparently supernatural) tale, often featuring mad monks, castles, ancestral halls, ruined abbeys, innocent maiden held captive by evil male, ghosts and spirits, etc. (Ann Radcliffe novels; The Castle of Otronto, 1764, Northanger Abbey, c. 1790s)
Image: engraving from Radcliffes Sicilian Romance (1790)

Good Introductory Resources

Davidson, Cathy. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. New York: Oxford UP, 1986. Brown, Richard D. Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 17001865. New York: Oxford UP, 1989. Zboray, Ronald. A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public. New York: Oxford UP, 1993. Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.