Description
Book SynopsisIn the decades after U.S. independence, American novelists carried on an argument that pitted direct democracy against the representative liberalism they attributed to their British counterparts. The result was an American novel distinguished by its use of narrative tropes that generated a social system resembling today's distributed network.
Trade Review"Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse have long been our preeminent theorists of the novel. In this latest, virtuoso installment, they take on the novels of the early republic, seeing this corpus as nothing less than a template for a new polity, an updated version of the global and the local, replacing the hierarchical social contract of their English counterparts with a managed horizontality, a controlled redistribution of property and sensibility. Electrifying and eye-opening." * Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University *
"An important, timely, and much-needed book. Few accounts of the early American novel have the tenacity, willingness, and breadth of learning to accomplish what Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse do here: to reframe the novel form in relation to what has been thought of as its American variant. When this book has done its work, there will be no British novel or American novel; there will be the 'network novel.'" * Lloyd Pratt, University of Oxford *
Table of ContentsIntroduction. Argumentum ad Populum
Chapter 1. Style in the Time of Epidemic Writing
Chapter 2. Refiguring the Social Contract
Chapter 3. Novels as a Form of Democratic Writing
Chapter 4. Dispersal
Chapter 5. Population
Chapter 6. Conversion
Chapter 7. Hubs
Chapter 8. Anamorphosis
Chapter 9. Becoming National Literature
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments
