Novels in the Time of Democratic Writing

Nancy Armstrong is the Gilbert, Louis, and Edward Lehrman Professor of English at Duke University. She is author of How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719-1900 and Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism. Leonard Tennenhouse is Professor of English at Duke University. He is author of several books, most recently, The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750-1850. Together, Armstrong and Tennenhouse are authors of The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life.

• Introduction. Argumentum ad PopulumChapter 1. Style in the Time of Epidemic WritingChapter 2. Refiguring the Social ContractChapter 3. Novels as a Form of Democratic WritingChapter 4. DispersalChapter 5. PopulationChapter 6. ConversionChapter 7. HubsChapter 8. AnamorphosisChapter 9. Becoming National LiteratureNotesWorks CitedIndexAcknowledgments

"Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse have long been our preeminent theorists of the novel. In this latest, virtuoso installment, they take on the novels of the early republic, seeing this corpus as nothing less than a template for a new polity, an updated version of the global and the local, replacing the hierarchical social contract of their English counterparts with a managed horizontality, a controlled redistribution of property and sensibility. Electrifying and eye-opening." (Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University) "An important, timely, and much-needed book. Few accounts of the early American novel have the tenacity, willingness, and breadth of learning to accomplish what Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse do here: to reframe the novel form in relation to what has been thought of as its American variant. When this book has done its work, there will be no British novel or American novel; there will be the 'network novel.'" (Lloyd Pratt, University of Oxford)