Reading the American Novel 1780 - 1865

Shirley Samuels is Professor of English and American Studies at Cornell University. She is the author of Romances of the Republic (1996) and Facing America (2004), and editor of The Culture of Sentiment (1992) and The Companion to American Fiction, 1780–1865 (2004).

Acknowledgments xv

1 Introduction to the American Novel: From Charles Brockden rown’s Gothic Novels to Caroline Kirkland’s Wilderness 1

2 Historical Codes in Literary Analysis: The Writing Projects of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Elizabeth Stoddard, and Hannah Crafts 23

3 Women, Blood, and Contract: Land Claims in Lydia Maria Child, Catharine Sedgwick, and James Fenimore Cooper 45

4 Black Rivers, Red Letters, and White Whales: Mobility and Desire in Catharine Williams, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville 67

5 Promoting the Nation in James Fenimore Cooper and Harriet Beecher Stowe 91

6 Women’s Worlds in the Nineteenth-Century Novel: Susan B. Warner, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Fanny Fern, E. D. E. N. Southworth, Harriet Wilson, and Louisa May Alcott 119

Afterword 151

Further Reading 165

Index 171

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