A Companion to American Fiction, 1865 - 1914

A Companion to American Fiction, 1865-1914 is a groundbreaking collection of essays written by leading critics for a wide audience of students, scholars, and interested general readers. Containing 29 essays and 12 illustrations with accompanying texts, this comprehensive volume is divided into three sections covering historical traditions and genres, contexts and themes, and major authors. The essays address a mixture of canonical and non-canonical subjects; so, alongside treatment of such standard topics as realism, naturalism, and regionalism are contributions on the romance, sentimentalism, early modernism, African American and Native American narratives, women's fiction, class, ethnicity, and the short story. A significant feature of the book is its inclusion of chapters on both frontier and urban narratives, Civil War literature, Darwin's influence on fiction, children's literature, consumer culture, law and narrative, utopian fiction, and ecological literature and ecocriticism. Contributors present lucid syntheses of the best criticism available on their topics and, at the same time, offer original perspectives of their own. The Companion is a book that no one interested in nineteenth-century fiction or American literature can do without.

Robert Paul Lamb is Associate Professor of English at Purdue University. The author of many articles on American literature and recipient of Harvard University’s Bowdoin Prize for scholarship, his teaching honors include Harvard’s Stephen J. Botein Prize, Purdue’s University Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching, Purdue’s Liberal Arts Departmental Award for Educational Excellence, and induction into The Purdue Book of Great Teachers.

G.R. Thompson is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Purdue University. His previous publications include the Norton Critical Edition of Edgar Allan Poe (2004), Neutral Ground: New Traditionalism and the American Romance Controversy (1999), The Art of Authorial Presence: Hawthorne’s Provincial Tales (1993), Essays and Reviews ofEdgar Allan Poe (1984), Ruined Eden of the Present: Hawthorne, Melville and Poe (1981) and Poe’s Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (1973).