5 - How to Read an Early American Novel

Summary

Can novels change the world, or must they merely inscribe, and thereby fortify, its injustices? Throughout a range of critical approaches, including new aesthetics, sexuality studies, book history, affect theory, environmental humanities, critical slavery studies, Native American and Indigenous studies, network theory, the spatial turn, world-systems, gender studies, network theory, health humanities, and more, tensions run high in early Americanist literary scholarship between a realist conviction that worlds create books and an equally resolute commitment to the possibility that books – especially fictions – create worlds. This chapter hopes to honor, rather than quiet, this critical ferment. To explain without explaining away will be its challenge. To create a place for those early American authors, meanwhile, who have not until recently been recognized in literary studies because their textual creations do not meet normative standards for book-length imaginative prose will be its sustaining goal.