Is There An Early American Novel?

Abstract

As scholars from Leslie Fiedler to Philip Fisher have demonstrated, James Fenimore Cooper's frontier fiction lends itself to allegorical readings about the founding of a nation at once masculine and American in origin. An obvious tautology informs all such readings: if novels are about history or should be, in order to qualify as the genuine American article then we must look to history to tell us what these novels are about. Besides marginalizing so much of the fiction actually produced and consumed in the early republic, reading to validate our historical preconceptions is further disadvantaged by two faulty assumptions. First, allegory treats fiction as a coy, even deceptive text that offers a more fashionably dressed or locally targeted way of explaining what history being based on fact can say in a forthright manner. Moreover, to read allegorically, we must overlook the fact that history is a narrative too. Whether it explains how we overthrew an oppressive father/ king, displaced an older European imperialism with our more recent brand, or transformed homegrown democracy into sovereignty in a global configuration of nations, literary criticism is updating the same old story. The consequences of undervaluing the early American novel and overvaluing twentieth-century historical accounts of nation-making are evident in the first volume of the new Cambridge History of American Literature (Bercovitch), which claims to cover major literary genres, styles, and topics and yet has next to nothing to say about novels written during the period of the Revolution and the founding of the new republic. Why is this reading method still so well entrenched?