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). She also edited the Cambridge Companion to Abraham Lincoln (2012).

• Preface viiAcknowledgments xv1 Introduction to the American Novel: From Charles Brockden Brown's Gothic Novels to Caroline Kirkland’s Wilderness 12 Historical Codes in Literary Analysis: The Writing Projects of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Elizabeth Stoddard, and Hannah Crafts 233 Women, Blood, and Contract: Land Claims in Lydia Maria Child, Catharine Sedgwick, and James Fenimore Cooper 454 Black Rivers, Red Letters, and White Whales: Mobility and Desire in Catharine Williams, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville 675 Promoting the Nation in James Fenimore Cooper and Harriet Beecher Stowe 916 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 119Afterword 151Further Reading 165Index 171