Ideology And Genre

Abstract

Abstract This wandering son of the new Republic come home again is especially struck by the “extreme avidity with which books of mere amusement [are] purchased and perused by all ranks.”1 And Tyler’s fictional comments are by no means thenly observations on this remarkable new interest in fiction. As the editor of New York Magazine decisively proclaimed in 1797, “This is a novel-reading age.” In chapter 2, I focused on the manufacture of fiction at the dawning of the Industrial Revolution and, correspondingly, on the economic origins of the American novel. I traced how the form first appeared in a transitional society, preindustrial in its modes of production yet protocapitalistic in its modes of consumption, and I surveyed how the new genre along with its early producers—individual authors and enterprising printers-survived financially in a postcolonial world that merely presaged mass book production and mass consumption. In this chapter, my focus is on the politics of genre and, more specifically, on the ideological position that the novel as a genre was perceived to take in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War—a vital and volatile time when the ideals of the nation had to be formulated and promulgated. I ask how the new form survived in a society that, on the highest levels, was intensely hostile to its appearance.