Novels in the Time of Democratic Writing: The American Example ed. by Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (review)

Writing both separately and together Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse have, over the last thirty years, consistently shaped the direction of early American literary studies. Their latest collaboration, Novels in the Time of Democratic Writing, promises to maintain this field-defining track record, thanks to the richly conceptualized and fluently argued case it makes for literary formalism and network theory as (re)emerging critical approaches that can provide innovative perspectives on the fiction of the early Republic. Here Armstrong and Tennenhouse set out to displace Benedict Anderson's seminal paradigm of the "imagined community," and its conflation of the novel form with a unified sense of national identity, by suggesting that the loosely structured plots and endlessly mobile protagonists typical of the early American novel can best be read as the expression of a young nation that was politically decentralized and geographically dislocated rather than homogenously centripetal. Consequently, this book contends, late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century American novelists differed radically from their British contemporaries, who managed to securely ground their protagonists within the safe confines of ordered households, inherited land, and familiar communities. Aesthetically and ideologically unable to transplant these thematic motifs to the New World, in Armstrong and Tennenhouse's view, figures like Charles Brockden Brown, Hannah Webster Foster, and Leonora San-say instead developed their own fictional vocabulary. Thus, the central aim of Novels in the Time of Democratic Writing is to show how, in the work of these writers and many others, "a sequence of particular tropes mobilized a social network that replaced the traditional concept of property as the traditional means for a novel to organize its field of characters" (15).

In tracing how this argument is prosecuted Novels in the Time of Democratic Writing can essentially be divided into three parts. The first three chapters lay out the critical and historical parameters for understanding the distinctive formal patterns adopted by America's first novelists. Accordingly, chapter 1 considers the question of "style"—and urges us to approach it as a mode of representing social relations rather than a marker of authorial flair—through a comparison between the opposingly fluid and introspective communities portrayed in the writings of Brockden Brown and Jane Austen. In this respect, if we accept that "style consists of formal rules that writers must observe in order to engage prospective readers in a community that forms according to those rules," then the picaresque wandering in Brown's Arthur Mervyn (1799) "affords glimpses of the affirmative potential in having no fixed identity, as well as the advantages of a government always in the process of reformulating itself" (19, 33). The question of how the newly born United States came to have such a dynamically adjustable political system becomes the subject of chapter 2, which deals with the transformations that the European model of the social contract underwent during the American Revolution and the solutions that the Founding Fathers developed for harmonizing a polity increasingly understood to be dominated by "men of interests" rather than "men of property," while the relationship of the early American novel's untidy formal qualities to traditional theories of the novel is discussed in chapter 3, which utilizes Jacques Rancière's distinction between "democratic writing" (a style that addresses everyone equally) and "literature" (a style that privileges the author's voice) in order to make an effective case for rescuing the early American novel from its marginal place in a canon oriented around Forsterian notions of literary cohesion.

Following this important and invariably thought-provoking groundwork, Novels in the Time of Democratic Writing then spends its next five chapters delineating the five particular "formal moves, or tropes" that Armstrong and Tennenhouse see as distinguishing early republican fiction from that being written across the Atlantic (11). Here, in a series of wide-ranging case studies, we get what are easily among the most sophisticated and thorough of...