Beyond early American exceptionalism : class and the rise of the U.S. novel, 1792-1846
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Between constitutional ratification and the crisis over slavery, the market revolution transformed labor relationships and exacerbated disparities in wealth; in these same decades, the first self-conscious working-class movements began to emerge in the United States. Yet, literary history has yet to appreciate the representation of class division and conflict in American fiction of this period, as if class enters the U.S. literary imagination only in the late 1840s. This dissertation uncovers the decisive impact of economic inequality on the first fifty years of the U.S. novel, tracing the prominence of poor and working-class characters in novels by Charles Brockden Brown, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and James Fenimore Cooper. Genre is where history and form intersect. Each chapter examines a different generic mode of the early U.S. novel: the Bildungsroman, the picaresque novel, the sentimental domestic novel, and the frontier romance. By revealing the extent to which these genres were all embroiled in debates about the distribution of wealth, Beyond Early American Exceptionalism demonstrates how the paradox of class motivated a spectrum of fictional responses in the early U.S. and thus impacted the emergence of the U.S. novel as a form. Novels, I argue, made economic inequality in the early U.S. highly visible--but they also represented it as a desirable fact of American life.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2011 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Shapiro, Joseph Paul |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, English Department |
| Primary advisor | Jones, Gavin |
| Primary advisor | Moretti, Franco, 1950- |
| Thesis advisor | Jones, Gavin |
| Thesis advisor | Moretti, Franco, 1950- |
| Thesis advisor | Tawil, Ezra F, 1967- |
| Advisor | Tawil, Ezra F, 1967- |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Joseph Paul Shapiro. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of English. |
| Thesis | Ph.D. Stanford University 2011 |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2011 by Joseph Paul Shapiro
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Also listed in
Loading usage metrics...