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

3: The Re-export Republic and the Rise of the Early American Novel

u 3 The transformation of Western European society through the long eighteenth century from early modern political, juridical, belief, and exchange systems to modern ones ends with the enlargement and incipient consolidation of two classes: the bourgeoisie and an urban, provincial, and colonial proletariat formed from a collection of previously discrete or loosely affiliated groups. This sociogenesis occurs through a geoculture of sensibility , sensation, slavery, and sentimentality, which belongs to an Atlantic world-system dominated by the British and French imperial nation-states. The expansive phase of this long wave of political economy peaks in the mid-1700s as Britain and France confront each other for control of global resources. While Britain won the first round with the result of the Seven Years’ War, it did not do so decisively enough to prevent both nation-states, and by extension the world-system, from falling into a contractive phase from the 1760s to the 1790s.1 As neither the British nor the French were able to recover easily from the war’s costs, the next three decades saw various attempts by both powers to regain profitability through a variety of internal social and political reorganizations. The inconclusive result of the midcentury conflict ultimately led to a rematch in the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars of the early 1790s and mid-1810s, a period that marks the transition to an ensuing, now clearly British-led configuration of the world-system and renewed expansive economic phase. The pressures created in the formal restructuring of world-systemic cycles and passage from a depressive to an expansive phase during the 1790s are immediately registered in the world-system’s homeostatic buffer zones, the Atlantic semiperipheries. 1. Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 263; Frank, World Accumulation, 1492–1789 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 108. the re-export republic and the rise of the early american novel Because the semiperipheries articulate the commodity chains between the core and periphery, these contact zones are sites of complex social and cultural transvaluations as they negotiate the exchange of the core’s credit for the periphery’s labor-power through the monetarization and materialization of value in tangible commodities. Consequently, these spheres are where new cultural forms emerge or become amplified as a product of their channeled circulation of social energies, particularly in times of phase change when the pressure to maintain macrosystemic integrity dramatically increases. Economic conflicts rarely dictate or simply predetermine cultural representations . They do, however, project a variety of tensions and contradictions into a social field composed by a constellation of customary and institutionalized labor relations, household arrangements, corporate practices, and status identities of region, kinship, and religion. The conjuncture of these manifold alterations becomes manifested in cultural commodities, like novels, that reflect and respond to ongoing social fluctuations. For the American case, it would be overly simplistic to say that the early American novel is simply the transcription of the Franco-British conflict over the Atlantic system and its linked events, like the French and Haitian revolutions. Yet the effects of these antagonisms do catalyze a series of reactions that sediment new cultural formations, like fictional prose, as a medium of enunciating global changes in the Atlantic world-system. Because the creation of new modes of expression and symbolism requires tremendous cultural labor, which nascent social groups can rarely afford in times of large-scale transition, given that they lack the resource advantage of traditional institutions, semiperipheral agents typically invoke the preexisting geocultural elements that constitute the terms of a fading world-system as their syntax of representation within times of systemic reorganization. These quasi-marginal groups appropriate already present elements not because these symbolic codes are manifestations of the core’s authority, but because the ongoing breakup of a long-held global order means that core authorities no longer tightly control the manner in which these symbolic codes are used. As codes become increasingly up for grabs, noncore subjects can use the gap between the fading order and their own current interests to reconstitute these figurations as a structure of feeling that awkwardly marks out their emerging social position. If the transformations in the 1790s United States encouraged Americans to inhabit the already established, but also slightly shabby, form of the Anglo-French novel, 98 u the culture and commerce of the early american novel they did so as a means of telegraphing their aspirations...