Founded in Fiction: The Uses of Fiction in the Early United States by Thomas Koenigs

Abstract

Reviewed by: Founded in Fiction: The Uses of Fiction in the Early United States by Thomas Koenigs Joseph Rezek (bio) Founded in Fiction: The Uses of Fiction in the Early United States thomas koenigs Princeton University Press, 2021 336 pp. This book offers one of the most fascinating reinterpretations of the early US novel since Cathy Davidson's The Revolution and the Word (Oxford UP, 1986), published now almost forty years ago. Beginning where Davidson began, with the so-called first American novel, William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy (1789), and armed with Catherine Gallagher's field-defining essay, "The Rise of Fictionality" (2006), Koenigs does the hard and necessary work of separating, for early Americanists, the genre of the novel from what he calls the multiple "logics of fictionality" of the early national and antebellum periods (18). The novel did indeed "rise to dominance in the United States" (3), Koenigs admits, but not steadily or inevitably, not according to English models, and not at all with a simple relationship to fiction. The early US novel has long puzzled critics for its nonobvious relationship to the steadier and more familiar genres coming out of eighteenth-century Britain or that eventually dominated nineteenth-century America. Rather than consider earlier fictions as failed novels or as immature fictional experiments, Koenigs wants to read them on their own terms. That has been done before, but not with the kind of deep attention Koenigs brings to discourses of fictionality. He argues, polemically, that it is anachronistic to call every long prose fiction of the early US a novel. "In the spirit of Virginia Jackson's work on the lyricization of Emily Dickinson's poems," Koenigs writes, Founded in Fiction considers "the novelization of American fiction: the normalizing process by which a host of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century book-length prose fictions that figured their project in contradistinction to novels would come to be grouped together under the generic umbrella of 'the novel'" (16). Fictionality means many things in this book, but the most encompassing definition Koenigs gives is a "mode of address" that seeks after truth (rather than lies or fraud) but is "defined by its explicit or tacit acknowledgement of its fabricated nature" (23). This is close to Gallagher's definition of fictionality as a prose narrative that claims a "nonreferentiality that could be seen as a greater referentiality" and a "special way of shaping [End Page 258] knowledge through the fabrication of particulars" ("The Rise of Fictionality," The Novel, vol. 1, ed. Franco Moretti, Princeton UP, 2006, 342, 344). Whereas Gallagher's object is realism as it unfolded in England, Koenigs considers all modes and genres of truthful fabrication that operated in the early US. Another touchstone for Koenigs is Gerard Genette, who associated fictionality with literary autonomy. Founded in Fiction shows how some American writers, like Nathaniel Hawthorne, did arrive at the notion of fiction as a retreat from the world, but the book mainly tracks how fictionists before Hawthorne believed the mode was useful as a way to intervene in society. Koenigs tells the story of "individuals and movements that used different modalities of fiction for community building and social reform" (3). Early US novels do not resemble English realism, to be sure; but instead of explaining this as a lack of understanding, Founded in Fiction closely analyzes a series of choices American authors made as they shaped fictionality in their own context. These choices produce a variety of fictionalities that must be understood in relation to debates about fiction that swirled around novels and novel-writing in the US between 1780 and 1860. The first chapter opens with a wonderful declarative sentence: "The origins of the American novel do not correspond to the emergence of fiction in the United States" (27). What follows is the counterintuitive argument that we should read works like The Power of Sympathy and Charlotte Temple as nonfictional novels. This is different than merely saying these writers expressed an aversion to fiction, like so many did in the US at the time, or that they wrote "tales of truth" (42). More specifically, Koenigs argues that "these writers disavowed fictionality as the means...