Does American Fiction Have a History?

Literary historians have not served the American novel particularly well. Despite the genre’s vibrant presence in the cultural life of the United States and the impact of American fiction on world literature, there are surprisingly few histories of its emergence and main lines of development. Doubtless this is a consequence of the vast scope of the topic. The editors of the massive Cambridge History of the American Novel (2011) cover the terrain in no less than seventy-one individually authored essays broken into four temporal categories: beginnings through the Civil War; postbellum realism; modernism and beyond; and contemporary formations. In the course of the volume’s more than twelve hundred pages, the reader is invited to consider thematic, regional, and identity-based analyses, studies of individual authors, treatments of book production and reading practices, as well as considerations of genre and style. This mosaic approach has the considerable virtue of allowing readers to make their own paths through the thicket of material, while, if they choose, maintaining some coherence by following cross-references among the essays. Not all readers have welcomed this Emersonian approach. Reviewing the volume for The Wall-Street Journal, Joseph Epstein noted that “even now there is no consensus about who are the best American novelists of the past century” and complained that the Cambridge History’s inclusive method did not help sort that out. “With the gates once carefully guarded by the centurions of high culture now flung open,” he opined, “the barbarians flooded in, and it is they who are running the joint today.” Whether it is a good or a bad thing to have the barbarians in charge of the academy is a matter of dispute.

Philip F. Gura’s Truth’s Ragged Edge covers the same terrain as the first section of the Cambridge History with the aim of providing a coherent story about the early years of the genre. A further aim, as Gura indicates in his acknowledgments, is to integrate the story of the American novel into the influential narrative of American intellectual life developed by Perry Miller in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Gura also describes his book as “a revival of a dormant tradition” (p. xix) embodied in Alexander Cowie’s The Rise of the American Novel (1948) and Richard Chase’s The American Novel and its Tradition (1957), mid-century works that provided synthetic narratives about American fiction. Truth’s Ragged Edge responds to the recovery projects of recent decades by expanding the canon to include novels by women and African Americans. The result is less a history of American fiction per se and more an account of American fiction as it reflects the liberalizing and secularizing trends that influenced U.S. Protestantism between the Revolution and the 1880s, including contributions by female and black novelists.

Gura is a leading literary and cultural historian of the United States who has published important works on topics as varied as colonial American religious culture, Transcendentalism, and the banjo. His decision to publish with Farrar, Straus and Giroux signals an interest in the elusive general reader who, in decades past, might have picked up Cowie or Chase, but who has reportedly been alienated by specialization in literary studies. More selective and narrative-driven than the Cambridge History, Gura’s history is nevertheless unlikely to satisfy those such as Epstein who view literary scholarship as an exercise in gatekeeping. It will meet its warmest welcome among intellectual and cultural historians who find enduring value in Perry Miller’s approach. Whether it will appeal to general readers or shape the broader cultural narrative about American fiction remains to be seen.

The book is organized in three parts. The first covers the longest span of time, from the ratification of the Constitution in 1789—a year that also saw the appearance of William Hill Brown’s sensational The Power of Sympathy, a salacious tale of adultery and suicide that...