The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel: Reading the Atlantic World-System (review)

A reader who begins The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel expecting to read about novels is destined for a surprise. Rather than a study of the fiction itself, Shapiro's work is foremost a materialist history of the geographical, cultural, and economic forces that enabled a productive burst of American novels in the 1790s. Arguing that the limited production of novels in the immediate post-revolutionary era indicates that the novel was not primarily concerned with American independence or nation-state formation, Shapiro situates the novel within the realm of global economics. Shapiro contends that the Atlantic world system, probably best known through the work of Immanuel Wallerstein, is the only framework that adequately explains the subsequent uptick in American novel production in the 1790s, which he suggests was driven by the Caribbean reexport trade and economic power shifts from the landed elite to the urban commercial elite in port cities such as Philadelphia. While I was intrigued by Shapiro's application of world-systems theory in this context, I think it's important to keep in mind that a number of factors likely depressed American novel publications in the 1780s, among them lingering economic problems wrought by the war, including the instability of currency; the lack of national or international copyright, which exacerbated the riskiness of the low-profit margin business of novel publishing, especially given the availability of pirated and imported British productions; and, finally, war-related deaths or political exile among those inclined toward authorship. Shapiro is undoubtedly right that the economic boom fomented by the reexport business enabled the production of more novels in the 1790s, but it's also likely that the Federal Copyright Act of 1790 also played a significant role in encouraging literary productions, as did trade with China and India.

By focusing on logistical boundaries, rather than those of nation-state or empire, Shapiro's world-systems approach deemphasizes the connections between British and American novels and accentuates the considerable influence of the French and the Caribbean. After providing an excellent overview that historicizes the successive waves of criticism of early American fiction, Shapiro focuses in the first three chapters on the geocultural elements common to the Atlantic region. These include the discourse of sensibility, the sensational consumption of trade goods such as sugar and coffee, Atlantic slavery, and sentimental cultural productions such as novels. Chapter 2 includes a fascinating discussion of the role of sensibility and sentiment in regulating commercial behavior and legitimizing bourgeois interests; Shapiro's argument here should prompt critics to take a new look at how sensibility operates in early novels. In the wake of the American Revolution, Shapiro argues, the Caribbean reexport trade, imbricated in all of these geocultural elements, crucially reshaped American social and economic culture, creating the preconditions necessary for the emergence of American novels in the 1790s. Shapiro deals handily with objections to this new paradigm by acknowledging that "readers may find themselves suggesting counterfactuals of individual cases that do not operate, or even resist, the claims that I make for these categories as dominant geocultural forms and tendencies. . . . What is at stake here is not the purity of a totalizing category but the prevailing tendencies within that category" (41).

In such a world-systems approach, the New York Friendly Club becomes exemplary, for the members of the club engaged in professions that were largely supported by the reexport trade. Charles Brockden Brown holds the preeminent position among this group. Shapiro acknowledges that the carrying trade did not represent a totalizing experience for American writers, but he maintains that it is "an emergent one that dominates the cultural form of prose fiction. Brown was not the only novelist of the 1790s, but because he operates so clearly within the nodes that printed and circulated other novelists, his work has an emblematic quality that illustrates the cultural...