American Fiction and the Genre Critics

Abstract

The question of what is unique about nineteenth-century American fiction is asked and answered with such compulsive regularity in academic circles that by all logic its possibilities should be exhausted. Yet the opposite is true. Since the end of World War II even the most far reaching studies have done as much to obscure as to clarify the problem. They have dealt with symptoms rather than causes and have never adequately shown how nineteenth-century American fiction can be distinguished from English fiction of the same period. The common source of confusion is the critical theory that the differences between these fictions are differences in genre and that by dividing American fiction into romances and English fiction into novels we increase our understanding of the two traditions. This view originates in Lionel Trilling's essays, Manners, Morals, and the and Art and Fortune, receives its most direct expression in Richard Chase's The American Novel and its Tradition, and is implicit in Marius Bewley's The Eccentric Design. It rests on two major descriptive points. First, American writers, in contrast to English writers, have not used social observation to achieve their profoundest effects but have sought a reality tangential to society. Second, in subject matter and in presentation the American romance, unlike the English novel, is not bound by the ordinary and veers toward myth, allegory, and symbolism. As theoretical distinctions between the romance and the novel, these concepts are not unique to the genre critics. They are used by Northrop Frye in his Anatomy of Criticism and by Scott and Hawthorne. In an Essay on Romance written in 1823 for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Scott observed: