Nineteenth-Century American Fiction Research Articles

Animals in the American Classics: How Natural History Inspired Great Fiction, Haunted Property: Slavery and the Gothic and Writing the Mind: Social Cognition in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction

Animals in the American Classics: How Natural History Inspired Great Fiction, Haunted Property: Slavery and the Gothic and Writing the Mind: Social Cognition in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction

Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Our Discipline

Abstract This essay situates Marianne Noble’s Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, Dickinson (2019) and Hannah Walser’s Writing the Mind: Social Cognition in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (2022) in the current conversation our discipline has been having about sympathy/empathy. Noble and Walser describe ways of knowing other minds that avoid the dangers the discipline has associated with sympathy/empathy—foremost among them, the harm that comes from the assumption on the part of a witness to suffering that they can understand exactly what the sufferer is feeling. Noble finds in a group of nineteenth-century authors a conceptualization of sympathy that honors the differences between people and a state of benevolent not-knowing; Walser investigates how an overlapping cluster of nineteenth-century authors depicts ways of knowing other minds that do not require mind-reading. By making explicit the extent to which Noble’s and Walser’s exhilarating, rigorous studies align with our discipline’s association of empathy with a myriad of ethical harms, this essay seeks to carve out a space outside of this antipathy and suggest that literary sympathy can be seen as a narrative resource, with unpredetermined ethical effects, rather than an inevitable ethical lapse.This antipathy [towards empathy] has left the literary scholar with three options regarding [it]: (1) one can point out its dangers and offer more salubrious methods for interpersonal connection; (2) one can try to rescue empathy by demonstrating there are other ways of conceptualizing it; or (3) one can defend it.

Genres of Valuation: Marginalist Economics and American Literary Realism

Abstract This essay argues that late nineteenth-century American fiction, as exemplified by William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), is entangled in the period’s embrace of a new understanding of economic conditions, one premised on the significance of consumer data as the raw material of economic interpretation and fixated on mathematical analysis as a source of knowledge about value. Marginalism in economic theory and realism in American literary practice were contemporaneous efforts to mediate value at a moment of decisive transition in America, as a model of commodity-centered competitive capitalism yielded to the regime of corporate finance. The young academic economists of the period and their literary counterparts explained the economic landscape in much the same way and to many of the same ends. Both began with the daunting question of how to reimagine value in a world characterized by fictitious goods and increasingly abstract financial instruments, a world in which the labor theory of value seemed hopelessly outdated. Both responded to this challenge by proposing novel intellectual procedures for making values appear stable again by focusing on the subjective experiences of consumers. Finally, both marginalists and realists sought to provide a quasi-scientific bedrock for fixing values in consumer society not only by appealing nostalgically to an economy of actual goods and honest work but more importantly by accommodating readers, policy makers, and stakeholders of all kinds to the new realities of finance capitalism.

Love and Depth in the American Novel: From Stowe to James

Love and Depth in the American Novel: From Stowe to James

“Fog-Shaped Men”: The Remnant Figure in Postbellum American Regionalism

This essay isolates, analyzes, and contextualizes a prevalent character type in nineteenth-century American fiction that it calls (following Ina Ferris) the “remnant.” Although remnants appear in the earliest American experiments in fiction, the type becomes truly ubiquitous in postbellum regionalist writing. Depicted as living relics or belated leftovers from superseded cultural epochs, remnants, the essay claims, project the distinctly modern modalities of displacement and ontological insecurity into the regionalist texts they inhabit, thus unsettling the conventional critical readings of the genre as a backward-looking nostalgic form while also opening anew the question of regionalism’s complicated appeal for its contemporary readers. While beginning and ending with Sarah Orne Jewett’s representative remnant figure, Captain Littlepage, the essay also surveys several lesser-known examples, discusses the type’s peculiar characteristics, and speculates on the reactions it drew from its original audiences.

Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century AmericaSchooling Readers: Reading Common Schools in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction

Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century AmericaSchooling Readers: Reading Common Schools in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction

Patricia Crain. Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. 280 pp. - Paul B. Ringel. Commercializing Childhood: Children's Magazines, Urban Gentility, and the Ideal of the Child Consumer in the United States, 1823–1918. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015. 272 pp. - Allison Speicher. Schooling Readers: Reading Common Schools

Patricia Crain. Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. 280 pp. - Paul B. Ringel. Commercializing Childhood: Children's Magazines, Urban Gentility, and the Ideal of the Child Consumer in the United States, 1823–1918. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015. 272 pp. - Allison Speicher. Schooling Readers: Reading Common Schools in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2016. 248 pp. - Volume 59 Issue 2

Michaela Keck, Deliberately out of Bounds: Women’s Work on Classical Myth in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (Heidelberg: Winter, 2017), 363 pp.

Michaela Keck, Deliberately out of Bounds: Women’s Work on Classical Myth in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (Heidelberg: Winter, 2017), 363 pp.

Schooling Readers: Reading Common Schools in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction by Allison Speicher

Reviewed by: Schooling Readers: Reading Common Schools in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction by Allison Speicher Mary Roca (bio) Allison Speicher. Schooling Readers: Reading Common Schools in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction. U of Alabama P, 2016. In Schooling Readers: Reading Common Schools in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction, Allison Speicher assembles an impressive archive of 125 understudied texts from the 1830s to the 1880s to examine the literary tradition of U.S. common school narratives. Her study investigates literature's role in the common school reform movement, a prominent force during the nineteenth century. Although most American communities had some form of local schooling by the early nineteenth century, practices, purposes, and costs of schooling nevertheless varied widely. Advocates for common school reform promoted a standardized system of institutions supported by public funds and freely available to local children—a structure that eventually informed today's public school system. Common school reform faced opposition, but as Speicher points out, many historians "have had difficulty recovering specifics of this opposition" (11). Speicher develops a compelling case that common school narratives—fictional representations of common schools, teachers, and students—not only offer specific details about support for and resistance to common school reform, but also intervene in the conversations shaping schooling and reform. Her study of American common [End Page 248] school narratives notably addresses gaps in both literary studies, which has focused primarily on British school fiction, and the history of education, which draws predominantly on nonfictional sources. Thoughtful, engaging, and well-written, Schooling Readers is an important and interesting read for children's literature scholars and historians of education, as well as any readers interested in the intersections of schooling and fiction. As Schooling Readers makes clear, nineteenth-century ideas about schooling in both fiction and nonfiction varied widely, depending on author's perspective, intended audience, and publication venue. Speicher argues that fiction is an important, and understudied, resource for information about nineteenth-century schooling because it provides specificity lacking in the "grand generalizations" of reformers' nonfictional materials (7). In their efforts to balance instruction, education, and artistry, Speicher argues, common school narratives offer readers equivocal, often conflicting "lessons," and also show "a particular vision of what school did, could, or should look like" (4). Speicher maintains that, collectively, these narratives "offer unique insights into the ways common school reform was negotiated" (6). In doing so, she places fiction in conversation with reformers, educators, and historians to show how common school narratives intervened in debates about the purposes and practices of schooling. Speicher's approach is significant, as she "flips" the conventional logic of studying "what literature means and what schools do" in order to consider "what literature does and what schools mean" (4). Ultimately, Speicher finds that "school fictions are multivocal and untidy, reflecting the messiness of the school experience they present" (17). Her work successfully provides "a productive response to that messiness," as she makes full use of the richness of her archive rather than flattening it. Her impressive collection of materials thus calls to attention how there was not one nineteenth-century ideal of schooling, but rather ongoing negotiations of schools and schooling as they transformed across the century. Speicher strategically organizes Schooling Readers into four thematic chapters focused on the dominant plots she identifies within the common school narrative tradition: spelling bees and school exhibitions, acts of violence against teachers, school romances, and teacher-student adoptions. She explains that, in developing her archive, she discovered common school narratives in a variety of publications and genres, including "sentimental novels, local color sketches, reform novels, regional novels, [and] cheap magazine fiction" (2). This variety shows both the popularity of common school narratives during this period and the wide range of perspectives, as these publications targeted different audiences. Her texts are "geographically diverse," but notably "not in equal proportions"—although extending into the 1880s allowed Speicher to incorporate more southern fiction (13–14). According to Speicher, these [End Page 249] plots show surprising similarities in form and content across time and location, despite such major historical disruptions as the Civil War as well as significant changes in schooling across the century. Speicher thus organizes the chapters thematically rather than chronologically to...

Schooling Readers: Reading Common Schools in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction AllisonSpeicher. University of Alabama Press, 2016.

Schooling Readers: Reading Common Schools in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction AllisonSpeicher. University of Alabama Press, 2016.

Review: Schooling Readers: Reading Common Schools in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction by Allison Speicher

Review: Schooling Readers: Reading Common Schools in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction by Allison Speicher

Fictions of Race: American Indian Policies in Nineteenth-Century British North American Fiction

This article explores the hemispheric and transatlantic uses of race and empire as tropes of settler-colonial otherness in the novelThe Canadian Brothers(1840) by Canadian author John Richardson. In this pre-Confederation historical novel, Richardson contrasts the imperial British discourse of racial tolerance, and the British military alliances with the Natives in the War of 1812, with the brutality of American Indian policies south of the border, in an effort to craft a narrative of Canadian difference from, and incompatibility with, American culture. At the same time, the author's critical attitude towards all European military and commercial interventions in the New World illuminates the rootedness of both American and Canadian settler colonialisms in British imperialism, and exposes the arbitrariness and constructedness of the political boundaries dividing the continent.

The Nineteenth Century American Fiction: Hawthorne, “The House of the Seven Gables” and Its Reception: A Brief Overview

Critics have always been interested in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s literary oeuvre but that interest has varied over different periods of time. Nevertheless, we can claim that his books have always enjoyed a rousing reception. This paper discusses Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous romance The House of the Seven Gables and its reception from the time of its publication, 1851, to the present day. We will focus our attention on the essential features of the book that were commented on and reviewed by the most influential critics who dealt with Hawthorne’s text.

Married or Single? by Catharine Maria Sedgwick

Reviewed by: Married or Single? by Catharine Maria Sedgwick Sabrina Starnaman (bio) Married or Single? Catharine Maria Sedgwick Edited by Deborah Gussman Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015 480pp. The recent republication of Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Married or Single? with an introduction by Deborah Gussman is a powerful addition to the recovery of nineteenth-century American women writers. This reprint in the University of Nebraska Legacies of Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers series makes another of Sedgwick’s novels [End Page 703] readily available for scholars and students. This novel explores marriage as a broad social issue and creates a positive space for single women. Married or Single?, originally published in 1857, resists the cultural imperative of marriage. In Sedgwick’s preface she suggests, using the royal we, “we raise our voice in all our might against the miserable cant that matrimony is essential to the feebler sex—that she is but an adjunct of man—in her best estate a helm merely to guide the nobler vessel. . . . [S]he has an independent power to shape her own course, and to force her separate sovereign way” (6). The novel makes this strong argument with a soft touch, providing positive examples of marriage (Eleanor’s marriage) and negative examples of marriage (Anne’s marriage for social and financial gain) and tabulating the high price of an unhappy marriage (Augusta’s marriage). Sedgwick’s protagonist, Grace Herbert, wrestles with the attentions of suitors, one who would like to marry her for her social value and one who does not think he is worthy of her. Gussman’s introduction establishes Sedgwick as a significant presence in nineteenth-century American fiction. Not only was Sedgwick included in The National Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Americans beside James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving, but Edgar Allan Poe praised Sedgwick as “not only one of our most celebrated and most meritorious writers, but attained reputation at a period when American reputation in letters was regarded as a phenomenon” (ix). According to Gussman, contemporary reviewers either wrote about consistent themes across Sedgwick’s novels and reinforced her identity as a “significant and morally up-standing American author” or relegated her to a second class of “feminine writers” (xii). Sedgwick’s novel about women’s lives outside marriage is ready for a critical reexamination. Married or Single? is set in New York City and is an exploration in manners, but also includes plot conventions such as epistolary story telling, a seduction plot, and a slave narrative. It offers up characters familiar to benevolence literature such as the beautiful but impoverished Jessie Manning and the wealthy and single Julia Travers, who devotes her energy to running “The Colored Orphan Asylum.” Gussman’s introduction raises provocative questions for classroom discussion about the novel and Sedgwick’s own concerns at publication—including her own ambivalence about “significant social and political issues of the antebellum period, including slavery, immigration, and women’s rights” (xvii). This edition is [End Page 704] well researched with extensive explanatory notes. For students and faculty, the works cited provides an excellent foundation for more in-depth research. This text is suited for both nineteenth-century Americanist and women’s literature courses and history courses. [End Page 705] Sabrina Starnaman University of Texas at Dallas Sabrina Starnaman sabrina starnaman is a clinical assistant professor of literary studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her research focuses on Progressive Era (1880–1930) American texts about women, urbanism, and disability. Currently she is completing a manuscript titled “Deforming the Neighbors: Cross-Class Urban Relations in Progressive Era Literature” and is developing a multimedia project inspired by Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills with digital artist and media scholar Xtine Burrough. She teaches courses on women’s literature, ethnic American Literature, literature and science, and nineteenth-century American Literature. She has an MA from Columbia University and a PhD in literature from the University of California, San Diego. Copyright © 2016 The University of North Carolina Press

Racial prejudice in nineteenth-century American fiction

Racial prejudice in nineteenth-century American fiction

Sentimental Readers: The Rise, Fall, and Revival of a Disparaged Rhetoric by Faye Halpern (review)

Reviewed by: Sentimental Readers: The Rise, Fall, and Revival of a Disparaged Rhetoric by Faye Halpern Amy Coté Faye Halpern. Sentimental Readers: The Rise, Fall, and Revival of a Disparaged Rhetoric. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2013. 215pp. $45.00 paper. Faye Halpern’s Sentimental Readers offers a nuanced examination of what she terms a “disparaged rhetoric.” This vigorous volume takes up the question of nineteenth-century American sentimental fiction by authors including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, and Henry Ward Beecher, asking how and why twenty-first-century readers approach these texts, how these approaches might differ from those of nineteenth-century readers, and how we might learn from the “uncritical” practices advocated by sentimental rhetoric. Halpern’s potential audience is broad: this book holds obvious appeal for specialists in nineteenth-century American fiction and rhetoric, but its detailed historical contextualization, careful close readings, engagement with affect and reader response theory, and feminist literary criticism make it a compelling text for scholars from various disciplines, periods, and geographical areas. Furthermore, Halpern’s reflections on and assertions about the role sentimental rhetoric might play in pedagogy makes this book a valuable asset for anyone involved in teaching, especially early years of undergraduate English. Halpern begins her volume by addressing widespread assumptions about sentimental fiction: that it is socially conservative, tied to traditional gender roles, full of derivative plots and forced deathbed conversion scenes, and ultimately a “lesser” form of literature. As Halpern succinctly claims, though, “Certainly, sentimental novels do have favourite plots and themes, but it is a premise of this book that we should see sentimentality as less of a what than a how: how does a sentimental text direct its audience to read?” (xv). Various incarnations of this question and its implication occupy the remainder of Sentimental Readers. Halpern grounds her first chapter in vigorous research and detailed socio-historical context. This chapter, while somewhat lengthy, sets out [End Page 210] the foundational problem encountered by professional rhetoricians and sentimental novelists alike throughout the nineteenth century. Through an investigation of Edwart Tyrrel Channing (1790 to 1856), Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, Halpern articulates the circular debate surrounding disingenuous eloquence and the potentially dangerous powers of persuasion wielded by public figures. Was the ability to persuade an audience an innate quality, or could it be learned through instruction and study? If the former, what was the function of professorships in rhetoric and oratory; if the latter, how was an audience to tell a true conviction from a manipulative performance? Using Channing’s writings and biography as a springboard, Halpern tackles the complexities of this question, reaching backwards as far as Socrates and forward to the “scribbling women”—the sentimental writers of the mid-nineteenth century. Harriet Beecher Stowe is the subject of Halpern’s second chapter. Here, Halpern asks why scholars have not explored connections between professional orators and sentimental writers, who so often use rhetorical strategies in their fiction. Through an examination of The Minister’s Wooing, which she calls Stowe’s “rhetorical manifesto” (34), Halpern tackles the question of disingenuous eloquence as sentimental novelists encountered it. Halpern contends that The Minister’s Wooing employs the conventional love triangle plot to stage a battle between different types of persuasion. A successful orator, according to Stowe, is someone whose outside and inside align perfectly: someone for whom “seeming” and “being” are indistinguishable. Halpern extends this reading into Uncle Tom’s Cabin, addressing what she terms the “paradoxes of sentimentality” (54). Chief among these paradoxes is the way sentimental fiction relies on orality in spite of its textual status—they “speak” and persuade, inspiring strong feelings in audiences both within and beyond the novel through reported speech, apostrophes, and direct appeals. This orality is bound up with a suspicion of the written word as unreliable and prone to conceal and thus implicated in the problem of disingenuous eloquence. As Halpern writes, “far from the medium being the message, the medium is undermined and … transformed by it. The pinnacle of sentimentality saw readers accepting this transformation and being transformed by it in turn” (63). For Stowe, then, characters must exist within the text without belonging exclusively...

Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature Neodomestic American Fiction

Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature Neodomestic American Fiction

From Gift to Commodity: Capitalism and Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction

From Gift to Commodity: Capitalism and Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction

From gift to commodity: capitalism and sacrifice in nineteenth-century American fiction

In this rich interdisciplinary study, Hildegard Hoeller argues that nineteenth-century American culture was driven by and deeply occupied with the tension between gift and market exchange. Rooting her analysis in the period's fiction, she shows how American novelists from Hannah Foster to Frank Norris grappled with the role of the gift based on trust, social bonds, and faith in an increasingly capitalist culture based on self-interest, market transactions, and economic reason. Placing the notion of sacrifice at the center of her discussion, Hoeller taps into the poignant discourse of modes of exchange, revealing central tensions of American fiction and culture.

Chastity Warrants for Women Public Speakers in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction

Accusations of sexual impropriety have been used against women public speakers at least since the Renaissance, and nineteenth-century America was no exception. In constructing public personae that worked with prevailing gender ideologies, women tried to preserve the appearance of sexual purity. This concern for chastity carried over into fictional representations of women public speakers. While some authors depicted such figures negatively, the three examined here—Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Louisa May Alcott, and Frances E. W. Harper—all defended the woman public speaker by providing warrants within the narrative structure for her chastity and by giving her a public mission that was appropriately feminine according to nineteenth-century gender ideology. These women authors also provided a utopian moment in their narratives in which the social benefits of allowing their protagonists to speak in public are dramatized. Studying the literary representations of women speakers, in any era, can help to illuminate the cultural milieu in which such women made their way.