Founded in Fiction: The Uses of Fiction in the Early United States

• Published in: Early American Literature Vol. 58; no. 1; pp. 258 - 314
• Main Author: Rezek, Joseph
• Format: Journal Article Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Chapel Hill University of North Carolina Press 01-01-2023; The University of North Carolina Press
• Subjects: 19th century; American literature; Book publishing; Company business management; Cooper, James Fenimore (1789-1851); Fiction; Gallagher, Catherine; Genre; Historical fiction; Novels; Reading; Realism; United States; United Kingdom; United Kingdom > UK; United States > US
• DOI: 10.1353/eal.2023.0019
• EISSN: 1534-147X
• ISSN: 0012-8163

Beginning where Davidson began, with the so-called first American novel, William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy (1789), and armed with Catherine Gallagher's field-defining essay, "The Rise of Fictionality" (2006), Koenigs does the hard and necessary work of separating, for early Americanists, the genre of the novel from what he calls the multiple "logics of fictionality" of the early national and antebellum periods (18). Tyler's The Algerine Captive, for example, "stages the possibility that certain, disciplined fictions might serve as reliable sources of knowledge about the 'world as it is'" (64). Chapters 4-7 trace additional fascinating developments in fictionality from the 1820s to the 1860s in the context of an exponential growth of novel writing, printing, and reading. Chapter 5 compares Edgar Allan Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) to Robert Montgomery Bird's Shepherd Lee (1838), two radically unconventional fictions that grapple with "a shared question: what is the role of fiction-reading in a print culture where readers are endlessly confronted with dubious and ambiguous claims to truth, veracity, and authenticity?" (190).