Captaine Smith, Colonial Novelist

The novel has become the leading hero in the drama of literary development in our time precisely because it best of all reflects the tendencies of a new world still in the making; it is, after all, the only genre born of this new world and in total affinity with it.

—Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination

Most critics today maintain that the first American novel is William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy (1789), an assertion accompanied by a number of axioms about early American fiction. There is the much-noted irony, for starters, that the "Early American Novel" is far from early: in fact, the novel is a relative late-comer in the settlement and letters of North America. ¹ This delayed arrival is attributed to a constellation of mutually reinforcing factors: the slow development of printing, the absence of a critical mass of readers, the late emergence of a book market, limited leisure time for writing and reading, relative neglect of belletristic culture, and cultural prohibitions against fiction writing. ² In short, the infrastructure necessary for novels did not arise in this country until the early national period, suggesting a natural association of the novel with the nation. Recently, however, there have been some challenges to this conventional account. I'm not speaking here of attempts to label any number of novelistic works from the 1750s to the 1770s as the real first novel. These arguments largely accept the standard view of the novel's late development while seeking slightly earlier titles from a broader popular repertoire. ³ Nor am I speaking of attempts, like William Spengemann's, to extend our definition of American to such works as Aphra Behn's Oroonoko—a useful and legitimate gesture, surely, but one that takes for granted generic categories. ⁴ What I have in mind, rather, are more fundamental challenges to the conceptualization of the novel, such as Robert Micklus's contention that Dr. Alexander Hamilton's The History of the Ancient and Honorable Tuesday Club is a "comic novel that borrows heavily from the ‘anatomy,'" or Grantland Rice's view that Letters from an American Farmer is a "bildungsroman of sorts," a narrative of "gradual demystification." ⁵

What these and similar challenges have in common is, first, their skepticism toward the commonsensical definition of the novel as a mass-printed, mass-marketed literary commodity of what readers identify as fiction, typically produced in national contexts. ⁶ Instead, Micklus's and Rice's references to the anatomy of the bildungsroman suddenly call our attention to a surprising silence about genre in early American studies, as if such an approach doesn't quite suit the colonial context. While it may be axiomatic to genre theory that fiction is not defined as that which is untrue but, rather, as "any work of literary art in a radically continuous form, which almost always means a work of art in prose," ⁷ Americanists are still more apt to adhere to the eighteenth-century definition of fiction formulated by a John Adams or a Jonathan Edwards.

But just as recent challenges undermine commonsensical literary categories, they likewise call attention to a nuts-and-bolts attitude toward the history of the novel. Most of the explanations for the "late" development of the American novel—limited developments in printing, markets, and club and salon culture plus the relative absence of leisure time—stress deficient material conditions in a fairly crude way, as if a literary version of Turner's frontier thesis were at work here. Meanwhile, the more cultural dimensions of this argument—for example, the cultural prohibitions against fiction—unwittingly reinforce the view of colonial culture as a theologically monolithic, top-down affair. By contrast, when we pause to consider Letters from an American Farmer or The History of the Tuesday Club as novels, we can immediately see the dangers of correlating material conditions with culture in an empiricist fashion (Hamilton's work was, of course, unpublished, while Crèvecoeur's first appeared...