Critical Fictions

Past studies have discussed antebellum and early national sentimental literature by and about women as a retreat from, or criticism of, the burgeoning market. In this landmark study, Joseph Fichtelberg examines how this literature actually helped to bring market behaviors into maturity. Between 1780 and 1870, Americans endured no fewer than seventeen economic depressions. Each one generated sentimental outpourings in which women came to personify the travails of the marketplace. In the early national period, novels like Martha Meredith Read's Margaretta and Isaac Mitchell's The Asylum depicted resolute heroines who soothed national ills with virtuous vulnerability. While men often languished in such novels, women thrived. Antebellum fictions extend the argument: bankrupt husbands dissolved in sentimental despair, while their wives used a different sensibility to understand, and adapt to, the market itself. These fictions used women characters to think through the problems of economic crisis and growth - a process completed by the Civil War, when popular fictions began to depict merchants and clerks as feminine. To master the market was to act like a woman - virtuous, immune to commercial temptation, and thus pure. This notion, Fichtelberg argues, was crucial to the onset of liberalism and the emergence of the American middle class. In addition to his discussions of popular, though noncanonical, writers such as Read and Mitchell, Fichtelberg also covers well-known authors such as Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Olaudah Equiano, and Walt Whitman. He brings to bear neglected sources (including the ledgers of Ralph Waldo Emerson) and interweaves best-selling novels and pamphlets with political debates and contemporary economic analyses to create rich descriptions of the era. A crucial addition to American literary criticism on sentimental literature, Critical Fictions is a groundbreaking analysis of the relations between commercial and sentimental discourses in early American literature as well as a history of early American economics. It will appeal to specialists as well as to the general reader interested in how American culture has portrayed women in ways that express its deepest needs.

Critical Fictions overthrows the received wisdom that early American sentimental fiction was a form of resistance to the impersonal rationality of commerce. Exploring commercial discourse and fiction from 1780 to 1870, he discovers sentiment to have been the organizing discursive structure of the market in the early republic, determining the character of negotiation and the force of reward and punishment, while providing the pathos of acquisition and contractual compromise. In this year when executive greed has made us notice the acquisitive passions of players in the market, Fichtelberg's insightful study teaches us that there has never been a divorce between the desires that impel commerce and those that bind persons in imaginative communities.--David Shields "editor of Early American Literature ", Ambitious, well-researched, and richly suggestive.--Journal of the Early Republic, An exemplary study of the early American novel, its cultural context, and its pragmatic intervention in the discourse crucial to the defining of democracy for a new republic. The study is wide in scope and fascinating in its findings--a must read for anyone studying writings from the era of the new republic.--Carla J. Mulford "Pennsylvania State University ", By finding the analogy between the affective and the economic in unexpected places, Fichtelberg demonstrates that it permeated American culture. In a series of well-argued chapters, he productively interprets writings by Crevecoeur, Emerson, Whitman, Olaudah Equiano, Martha Meredith Read, Isaac Mitchell, and Nathaniel Coverly.--American Literature

JOSEPH FICHTELBERG is an associate professor of English at Hofstra University.