TY - BOOK AU - Koenigs,Thomas TI - Founded in Fiction: The Uses of Fiction in the Early United States SN - 9780691188942 U1 - 813/.209 PY - 2021///] CY - Princeton, NJ PB - Princeton University Press KW - American fiction KW - 18th century KW - History and criticism KW - Theory, etc KW - 19th century KW - Literature and society KW - United States KW - History KW - Politics and literature KW - Social problems in literature KW - LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General KW - bisacsh KW - Arthur Gordon Pym KW - Jacksonian KW - Sheppard Lee KW - Uncle Tom’s Cabin KW - antebellum KW - classic KW - development of American novel KW - early American literature KW - female conduct KW - history of the novel KW - inner life KW - leisure KW - literary history KW - literary hoaxes KW - novelization KW - slave interiority KW - slave narrative KW - slave narratives KW - slavery KW - social activity KW - theory of the novel N1 - Frontmatter --; contents --; Introduction --; PART I --; chapter 1 The Problem of Fictionality and the Nonfictional Novel --; chapter 2 Republican Fictions --; chapter 3 Fictionality and Female Conduct --; PART II --; chapter 4 The Shifting Logics of Historical Fiction --; chapter 5 Hoaxing in an Age of Novels --; chapter 6 Fictionality and Social Criticism --; chapter 7 Fictionality, Slavery, and Intersubjective Knowledge --; Coda: Romance and Reality in the 1850s and Beyond --; Acknowledgments --; Notes --; Index; restricted access N2 - An original account of the importance of diverse forms of fiction in the early American republic—one that challenges the “rise of the novel” narrativeWhat is the use of fiction? This question preoccupied writers in the early United States, where many cultural authorities insisted that fiction-reading would mislead readers about reality. Founded in Fiction argues that this suspicion made early American writers especially attuned to one of fiction’s defining but often overlooked features—its fictionality. Thomas Koenigs shows how these writers explored the unique types of speculative knowledge that fiction could create as they sought to harness different varieties of fiction for a range of social and political projects.Spanning the years 1789–1861, Founded in Fiction challenges the “rise of novel” narrative that has long dominated the study of American fiction by highlighting how many of the texts that have often been considered the earliest American novels actually defined themselves in contrast to the novel. Their writers developed self-consciously extranovelistic varieties of fiction, as they attempted to reform political discourse, shape women’s behavior, reconstruct a national past, and advance social criticism. Ambitious in scope, Founded in Fiction features original discussions of a wide range of canonical and lesser-known writers, including Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Royall Tyler, Charles Brockden Brown, Leonora Sansay, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Montgomery Bird, George Lippard, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs.By reframing the history of the novel in the United States as a history of competing varieties of fiction, Founded in Fiction shows how these fictions structured American thinking about issues ranging from national politics to gendered authority to the intimate violence of slavery UR - https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691219820?locatt=mode:legacy UR - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9780691219820 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9780691219820/original ER -