Emergence of American Literary Narrative, 1820-1860

In the mid-nineteenth century writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville produced works of fiction that even today, centuries later, help to define what American literature means. In this work of innovative literary history, Jonathan Arac explains what made this remarkable creativity possible and what it accomplished. His work also delves into a deep paradox that has haunted American literature: our nation's great works of literary narrative place themselves at a tense distance from our national life.Arac prepares the way with substantial critical readings of masterpieces such as Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and the Narrative of Frederick Douglass, as well as astute commentary on dozens of other works of fiction, comic sketches, life testimony, and history. His interpretation demonstrates how the national crisis over slavery around 1850 led writers to invent new forms. In light of this analysis, Arac proposes an explanation for the shifting relations between prose narratives and American political history; he shows how these new works changed the understanding of what prose narrative was capable of doing--and how this moment when the literary writer was redefined as an artist inaugurated a continuing crisis in the relation of narrative to its public.

Arac's achievement is that he has covered the prose of the period authoritatively but from a highly original angle—not an easy combination. That's why his book reads freshly and compellingly rather than like the usual history of the topic. And that's why his pages are so valuable., At once methodologically rigorous and artfully constructed, The Emergence of American Literary Narrative, 1820-1860 promises to change the ways in which nineteenth century narratives are classified and interpreted. The Emergence of American Literary Narrative, 1820-1860 anticipates the importance of the category of the "national narrative" to the reconceptualization of the field of American literary studies, and it promises to become a required scholarly text for graduate students and undergraduates alike.

Jonathan Arac is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.