The Oxford History of the Novel in English
Volume 5: The American Novel from Its Beginnings to 1870
Oxford History of the Novel in English Series

The American Revolution and the Civil War bracket roughly eight decades of formative change in a republic created in 1776 by a gesture that was both rhetorical and performative. The subsequent construction of U.S. national identity influenced virtually all art forms, especially prose fiction, until internal conflict disrupted the project of nation-building. This volume reassesses, in an authoritative way, the principal forms and features of the emerging American novel. It will include chapters on: the beginnings of the novel in the US; the novel and nation-building; the publishing industry; leading novelists of Antebellum America; eminent early American novels; cultural influences on the novel; and subgenres within the novel form during this period. This book is the first of the three proposed US volumes that will make up Oxford's ambitious new eleven-volume literary resource, The Oxford History of the Novel in English (OHONE), a venture being commissioned and administered on both sides of the Atlantic

J. Gerald Kennedy is William A. Read Professor of English at Louisiana State University and author of Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing and Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity. He has edited four collections (two for OUP) and editions of Poe and Black Hawk. Leland S. Person is Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati and Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. He is the author of Aesthetic Headaches: Women and a Masculine Poetics in Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne, Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity, and The Cambridge Introduction to Nathaniel Hawthorne, and editor of several collections and a critical edition of The Scarlet Letter.