Description
Book SynopsisTaking the 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, this work charts the advent, decline, and reinvigoration of the early American novel.
Trade Review“Shapiro offers a powerfully synthesized reexamination of the early American novel.”
—A. T. Hale Choice
“Shapiro develops a stunning reconceptualization of the 1790s based on America’s position in Atlantic history at the end of the eighteenth century and an equally impressive analysis of what this reconceptualization means for our understanding of early American literature and culture.”
—Michelle Burnham Eighteenth-Century Studies
“As scholars such as Franco Moretti and Rodrigo Lazo encourage us to identify and expand the vast uncharted archives of novels that would necessarily alter our theories of the genre, Shapiro’s analysis reminds us that sometimes, just a few novels will do. His study paves the way, particularly for critics of sentimental, seduction, and popular fiction of the late eighteenth century, toward far richer accounts of how fictional forms function in the interstices between the early U.S. nation-state and the geo-economic, cultural, and political conditions of the American hemispheric context.”
—Gretchen J. Woertendyke Huntington Library Quarterly
“Shapiro’s [work] squarely and massively dissects market ideology. . . . [It] is what Harold Bloom would call a strong reading, with all the risks and benefits that boldness implies. . . . Shapiro reduces the era’s economic influences to an alliterative quartet—sensibility, sensational consumption, slavery, and sentiment. Although these terms have long been associated with eighteenth-century culture, their combination in a kind of social compound—a geoculture—is particularly powerful here. . . . Culture and Commerce is a massive, often brilliant, utterly original synthesis exposing important elements of the period’s structure of feeling.”
—Joseph Fichtelberg Early American Literature
“Culture and Commerce is a massive, often brilliant, utterly original synthesis exposing important elements of the period’s structure of feeling.”
—Joseph Fichtelberg Early American Literature
“Shapiro’s theory of the early American novel—grounded in the cultural realities of the historical moment and informed by an economic theory that thinks beyond the nation-state—is compelling.
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—Betsy Klimasmith Eighteenth Century Fiction
“In The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel: Reading the Atlantic World-System, Stephen Shapiro provides a compelling account of the emergence of the American novel as a cultural form deeply implicated within the global economic transitions of the 1790s. While the novel in the new United States is the ostensible focus of this book, Shapiro skillfully moves through an account of the economic, social, and intellectual worlds of the late eighteenth century to situate the cultural work of this literary form.”
—Adam C. Lewis Resources for American Literary Study
“Shapiro’s meaty introduction similarly engages broad questions of method, periodization, and geography. He also gives his readers a very clear understanding of his methodology, intervention in, and vision for the future of, American literary scholarship.”
—gretchen j. woertendyke Huntington Library Quarterly
Table of ContentsContents
Acknowledgments
1. Method and Misperception: The Paradigm Problem of the Early American Novel
2. The Geoculture of the Anglo-French Eighteenth-Century World-System
3. The Re-export Republic and the Rise of the Early American Novel
4. The Paradox of the Public Sphere: Franklin’s Autobiography and the Institution of Ideology
5. Wieland and the Problem of Counterinstitutionality
6. Arthur Mervyn and the Racial Revolution of Narrative Consciousness
Afterword: Early Nineteenth-Century American Studies and the World-Systems Perspective
Bibliography
Index
