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, 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.