Geschichte und Fiktion: Zum Funktionswandel des fruhen amerikanischen Romans (review)

Often dismissed as imitative, overly didactic, and melodramatic by Formalist literary historians before the 1980s, the place of the early American novel in American literary history used to be assessed mainly in terms of its gestational role as a precursor to the (presumably) more artistically mature and accomplished novels of the American Renaissance. If, during the last 20 years, the early American novel has nevertheless emerged as one of the most vibrant fields of inquiry in early American literary studies—evident in countless essays on the subject and important books such as Cathy Davidson's seminal Revolution and the Word, Jane Tompkins's Sensational Designs, Julia Stern's The Plight of Feeling, Elizabeth Barnes's States of Sympathy, and Edward Watts's Writing and Postcolonialism—it has largely been due to the overthrow of New Critical assumptions and aesthetic values by New Historicist critics who have interrogated the "cultural work" performed by the early American novel in negotiating the social, political, and economic tensions of the early republic. With Geschichte und Fiktion, Oliver Scheiding adds his own contribution to the growing body of scholarship on the early American novel. However, although he acknowledges his intellectual debts to Cathy Davidson's account of the early American novel's restructuring of reading behaviors and Edward Watts's discussion of the early American novel's metafictional tendencies, it is perhaps symptomatic of the general differences in American literary scholarship as practiced in Europe vis-à-vis the United States today, that, unlike his American colleagues, Scheiding (who teaches at the University of Tübingen) takes a strongly Formalist and (post-)Structuralist critical approach to his topic. This is the critical context evoked in the subtitle of his book—the "functional change of the early American novel"—by which Scheiding means not a change in the political, social, or economic function that the novel fulfilled in the early republic but rather an epistemic change in the distributive or "oppositional" relationship between historiography and fiction within what he calls an "inner-literary or literary-systemic" generic order (16). Scheiding argues that the narrative self-referentiality and metafictionality characteristic of the modern novel (whose rise literary historians often credited to the novels of the American Renaissance) saw not only its beginning but indeed its flowering already during the last two decades of the eighteenth century. The (post-) modern narrative stance of self-referentiality emerged in the early republic, Scheiding argues, with the attempts by novelists to effect an aesthetic reevaluation and a "re-negotiation" (Neuaushandlung) of the traditional discursive order that would insist on an opposition between historiography and fiction and that would privilege the former over the latter (13).

The book is divided into two parts. The first chapter of the first part attempts to formulate a general "functional-historical model for textual description" based on the works of German theorists and literary critics such as Wilhelm Vosskamp, Lothar Fietz, Winfried Fluck, Wolfgang Iser, and Odo Marquard. Scheiding's synthesis of these structuralist and reader-response theoretical models postulates the existence of a "literary generic system" (40) in which each genre fulfills certain epistemological functions defined by its discursive "boundaries" with competing genres co-existing within in a pyramid-like, hierarchical generic "system" of any given era (Gattungspyramide) (49, 60). At the center of Scheiding's argument about the early American novel is the eighteenth-century epistemological debate over the nature of historiography and the role of the historian—a debate taking place mainly in the essayistic and periodical literature of the period (reviewed in the second chapter of the first part in Scheiding's book). Whereas the representatives of the older discursive order, such as David Ramsay, insisted on the absolute difference between the historiographer and the writer of fiction based on the claim that the former's narrative merely copied an order and meaning that was already inherent in the factual events of history, representatives of the new discursive order, such as...