The culture and commerce of the early American novel : reading the Atlantic world-system / Stephen Shapiro.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Shapiro, Stephen, 1964-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

United States.

American fiction--18th century--History and criticism.

American fiction.

Capitalism in literature.

Commerce in literature.

Consumption (Economics) in literature.

Politics and literature--United States--History--18th century.

Politics and literature.

Genre:

History.

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

History

Physical Description:

vi, 371 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

University Park, Pa. : Pennsylvania State University Press, ©2008.

Summary:

"Taking his cue from Philadelphia-born novelist Charles Brockden Brown's Annals of Europe and America, which contends that America is shaped most noticeably by the international struggle between Great Britain and France for control of the world trade market, Stephen Shapiro charts the advent, decline, and reinvigoration of the early American novel. That the American novel "sprang so unexpectedly into published existence during the 1790s" may be a reflection of the beginning of the end of Franco-British supremacy and of the power of a middle class riding the crest of a new world economic system." "Shapiro's world-systems approach is a relatively new methodology for literary studies, but it brings two particularly useful features to the table. First, it refines the conceptual frameworks for analyzing cultural and social history, such as the rise in sentimentalism, in relation to a long-wave economic history of global commerce; second, it fosters a new model for a comparative American Studies across time. Rather than relying on contiguous time, a world-systems approach might compare the cultural production of one region to another at the same location within the recurring cycle in an economic reconfiguration. Shapiro offers a way of thinking about the causes for the emergence of the American novel that suggest a fresh approach to the paradigms shaping American Studies."--Jacket.

Contents:

Method and misperception: the paradigm problem of the early American novel

The geoculture of the Anglo-French eighteenth-century world system

The re-export and the rise of the early American novel

The paradox of the public sphere: Franklin's Autobiography and the institution of ideology

Wieland and the problem of counterinstitutionality

Arthur Mervyn and the racial revolution of narrative consciousness

Afterword: early nineteenth-century American studies and the world-systems perspective.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 305-349) and index.

ISBN:

9780271032900

0271032901

027103291X

9780271032917

OCLC:

167505181