Table of Contents:
  • Introduction / Shirley Samuels
  • PART I. HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS
  • National narrative and the problem of American nationhood / J. Gerald Kennedy
  • Fiction and democracy / Paul Downes
  • Democratic fictions / Sandra M. Gustafson
  • Engendering American fictions / Martha J. Cutter, Caroline F. Levander
  • Race and ethnicity / Robert S. Levine
  • Class / Philip Gould
  • Sexualities / Valerie Rohy
  • Religion / Paul Gutjahr
  • Education and polemic / Stephanie Foote
  • Marriage and contract / Naomi Morgenstern
  • Transatlantic ventures / Wil Verhoeven, Stephen Shapiro
  • Other languages, other Americas / Kirsten Silva Gruesz
  • PART II. FORMS OF FICTION
  • Literary histories / Michael Drexler, Ed White
  • Breeding and reading: Chesterfieldian civility in the early republic / Christopher Lukasik
  • The American gothic / Marianne Noble
  • Sensational fiction / Shelley Streeby
  • Melodrama and American fiction / Lori Merish
  • Delicate boundaries: passing and other crossings in fictionalized slave narratives / Cherene Sherrard-Johnson
  • Doctors, bodies, and fiction / Stephanie P. Browner
  • Law and the American novel / Laura H. Korobkin
  • Labor and fiction / Cindy Weinstein
  • Words for children / Carol J. Singley
  • Dime novels / Colin T. Ramsey, Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola
  • Reform and antebellum fiction / Chris Castiglia
  • PART III. AUTHORS, LOCATIONS, PURPOSES
  • The problem of the city / Heather Roberts
  • New landscapes / Timothy Sweet
  • The gothic meets sensation: Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, George Lippard, and E.D.E.N. Southworth / Dana Luciano
  • Retold legends: Washington Irving, James Kirke Paulding, and John Pendleton Kennedy / Philip Barnard
  • Captivity and freedom: Ann Eliza Bleecker, Harriet Prescott Spofford, and Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle / Eric Gary Anderson
  • New England tales: Catharine Sedgwick, Catherine Brown, and the dislocations of Indian land / Bethany Schneider
  • Harriet Beecher Stowe, Caroline Lee Hentz, Herman Melville, and American racialist exceptionalism / Katherine Adams
  • Fictions of the South: southern portraits of slavery / Nancy Buffington
  • The West / Edward Watts
  • The old southwest: Mike Fink, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Johnson Jones Hooper, and George Washington Harris / David Rachels
  • James Fenimore Cooper and the invention of the American novel / Wayne Franklin
  • The sea: Herman Melville and Moby-Dick / Stephanie A. Smith
  • National narrative and national history / Russ Castronovo.