Fictionality in the United States, 1789-1861
From the 1820s to the 1840s, the inclusion of historical subject matter changed from a means of disciplining fictionality to a means of licensing it. In the 1820s, the historical novel sought to distance itself from fiction and claimed an association with history, justifying itself as a vehicle of h...
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| 020 | |a 9781321053920 | ||
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| 100 | 1 | |a Koenigs, Thomas | |
| 245 | 1 | 0 | |a Fictionality in the United States, 1789-1861 |h [electronic resource] |
| 300 | |a 1 online resource (559 p.) | ||
| 500 | |a Advisers: Michael Warner; Jill Campbell; Caleb Smith | ||
| 500 | |a Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 75-09(E), Section: A | ||
| 502 | |a Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2014 | ||
| 506 | |a Access restricted by licensing agreement | ||
| 520 | |a From the 1820s to the 1840s, the inclusion of historical subject matter changed from a means of disciplining fictionality to a means of licensing it. In the 1820s, the historical novel sought to distance itself from fiction and claimed an association with history, justifying itself as a vehicle of historical knowledge. By the 1830s and 40s, historical novels claimed distinction from history, seeking evaluation in a framework of value specific to fiction. Part IV situates this shift in relation to the rise of historical societies in America and changing ideas about what constitutes history. It explores how the historical novels of the 1820s justified their projects within a framework of value shared with historiography, insisting that fiction's suppositional reference creates knowledge about the past that factual history cannot. It then unpacks the terms on which historical fiction disavowed this project of historical knowledge and came to reproduce the logic of the domestic fiction from which it had once claimed distinction. This shift crystallizes the way in which fiction-reading, regardless of subject matter, came to be seen as a private leisure activity oriented towards self-fashioning and aesthetic appreciation | ||
| 520 | |a In 1798, Charles Brockden Brown sent Thomas Jefferson a copy of his "American Tale" Wieland and a lament: "Whatever may be the merit of my book as a fiction, it is to be condemned because it is a fiction." Brown speaks to the pervasive suspicion of fiction in the early republic. Yet, even as many American novelists claimed that their books were "Founded in Fact," those writers who broke the taboo against fictionality did so with a sense that the mode had special advantages. Faced with this antifictional discourse, American writers interrogated the dangers and possibilities of the fictional mode, seeking to harness the mental processes elicited by different forms of fictionality for a range of pedagogical, political, and social projects. By approaching fictionality as a set of historically variable structures of supposition rather than a stable, genre-defining characteristic, this dissertation restores to view the varied logics of fictionality that the history of the novel has tended to normalize, including many that do not conform to the conception of fiction-reading as a private leisure activity that became hegemonic in the late 19th century | ||
| 520 | |a In early America, fictionality was a contested site at which writers and movements imagined and reimagined how texts could affect, persuade, educate, and move readers. This dissertation is an anatomy of the theories and forms of fiction circulating in the young republic, a literary history that, by resisting teleological genre history, does justice to the remarkable diversity of early American fiction. But more than a reconsideration of fiction's place in American literature, it is a history of how these diverse fictionalities shaped the way in which Americans thought and argued about the pressing political and cultural issues of their moment from national politics to gendered authority to the intimate violence of slavery. It is an account of how the historical contestations over, to use Brown's words, "the merit" of books "as fiction" structured social struggle in antebellum America | ||
| 520 | |a Part I of this dissertation offers an overview of the American antifictional discourse and examines the rise of the nonfictional novel in the United States. It considers the diverse strategies of authentication through which writers tried to sever the popular novel genre from its suspicious fictionality. Because early Americans worried that fiction would separate its citizens from civic life, fictionists with political aspirations felt compelled to advance elaborate arguments for the mode's value. Part II, "Republican Metafictions," takes up a group of 1790s fictions---by Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Royall Tyler, and Brockden Brown---that advanced arguments for fiction's value within the very arena of republican politics to which the mode was generally regarded as opposed | ||
| 520 | |a Part V then shows how this conception of fiction-reading as a private act divorced from political controversy came to shape even those fictions that broke with it. It explores how writers such as George Lippard and Harriet Beecher Stowe used fiction's perceived marginalization from politics and the public sphere to establish their texts' authority as instruments of social criticism. My history closes, perhaps counter-intuitively, with a nonfictional text: Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Jacobs highlights both her narrative's resemblance to and distinction from novels, simultaneously inviting and disallowing forms of identification associated with fictionality | ||
| 520 | |a While republican fictionists sought to recode fiction as a political genre, other writers embraced its perceived separation from publicity, positing it as an ideal vehicle for shaping the private conduct of young women. Part III, "Fictionality and Female Conduct," turns to fictions interested in influencing female behavior in the years from 1797 to 1822. These chapters explore the competing theories of didactic fiction espoused by Judith Sargent Murray, Tabitha Tenney, Leonora Sansay, Rebecca Rush, and Catherine Maria Sedgwick (among others) in order to trace the consolidation of fiction-reading as a discipline of private self-cultivation in the early nineteenth century | ||
| 590 | |a Access is available to the Yale community | ||
| 650 | 4 | |a Literature, American | |
| 710 | 2 | |a Yale University | |
| 773 | 0 | |t Dissertation Abstracts International |g 75-09A(E) | |
| 791 | |a Ph.D | ||
| 792 | |a 2014 | ||
| 793 | |a English | ||
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