I’m a lecturer at the University of Liverpool who researches 19th century American literature. A year studying in central Pennsylvania sparked my interest in early US writing and led me to a PhD in the subject. I’m fascinated in how American literature of this period both upholds and challenges the founding myths of the nation - liberty, egalitarianism, progress – and how new genres, such as science fiction and the gothic, develop over the century.
Charles Brockden Brown is the Founding Father of American gothic writing and Wieland is his weirdest but most readable novel. Written just after the Adams administration had banned speech criticizing the government, Wieland explores the dangers of uncontrolled speech and the threat of shadowy interlopers. The novel is narrated by Clara Wieland, whose family are plagued by increasingly threatening disembodied voices after the arrival of mysterious itinerant Frank Carwin. This domestic thriller not only showcases the development of the unreliable narrator but also questions the stability of the family and the nation in the early US.
Robert Montgomery Bird was a Renaissance man and author, working as a doctor, novelist, playwright, and farmer, and writing across multiple genres. His most experimental and worthwhile novel is Sheppard Lee, a piece of proto-science fiction in which the spirit of a recently deceased loafer travels through the bodies of a merchant, a dandy, a moneylender, a Quaker, an enslaved man, and an aristocrat. Bird’s novel satirizes social mobility in the early nation, articulates contemporary medical philosophy on mind/body dualism, and reveals anxieties that young white men may lose their place in society.
Sheppard Lee, Written By Himself is a work of dark satire from the early years of the American Republic. Published as an autobiography and praised by Edgar Allan Poe, this is the story of a young idler who goes in search of buried treasure and finds instead the power to transfer his soul into other men's bodies. What follows is one increasingly practiced body snatcher's picaresque journey through early American pursuits of happiness, as each new form Sheppard Lee assumes disappoints him anew while making him want more and more. When Lee's metempsychosis draws him into…
The Oracle of Spring Garden Road explores the life and singular worldview of “Crazy Eddie,” a brilliant, highly-educated homeless man who panhandles in front of a downtown bank in a coastal town.
Eddie is a local enigma. Who is he? Where did he come from? What brought him to a…
Early African American fiction is not as well-known as the slave narrative genre, but the few novels that do exist before the Civil War are sophisticated interpretations and developments of sentimental fiction. Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig is a bildungsroman charting the life of free Black servant girl Frado who is exploited and abused by her adopted white family. Wilson challenges the passive and flat portraits of Black men and women in most antebellum fiction, by portraying a complex and multifaceted character in Frado.
"They discussed the expediency of a speedy departure. Seth would first seek employment, and then return for Mag. They would take with them what they could carry, and leave the rest with Pete Greene, and come for them when they were wanted. They were long in arranging affairs satisfactorily, and were not a little startled at the close of their conference to find Frado missing. They thought approaching night would bring her. Twilight passed into darkness, and she did not come. They thought she had understood their plans, and had, perhaps, permanently withdrawn. They could not rest without making some…
Another example of early African American fiction, The Garies and their Friends is the second novel published by a Black American. Following the lives of an interracial couple moving from Savannah to Philadelphia, their middle-class Black friends, and the racism they face, The Garies is one of the first texts to examine free Black life in depth. Writing an anti-racist novel, Webb criticizes the legal structures and extra-legal white supremacist violence that prohibit Black safety and success in the ‘free’ North.
In this novel set in antebellum America, the Garies -- a white southerner, his mulatto slave-turned-wife, and their two children-have moved to Philadelphia from Georgia. Originally published in London in 1857, and never before available in paperback, The Gages and Their Friends was the second novel published by an African American and the first to chronicle the experience of free blacks in the pre-Civil War northeast. The novel anticipates themes that were to become important in later African American fiction, including miscegenation and "passing", and tells the story of the Garies and their friends, the Ellises, a "highly respectable and…
None of them knew what was coming, and none of them will ever be the same again...
Detective Jelani is a tough, veteran cop. His younger partner, Detective Madigan, is brash and confident. But they were not prepared to become embroiled in a series of cosmic events they could never…
Although Herman Melville is considered the most canonical US writer today, after the muddled reception of Moby-Dick (1851) his critical and commercial acclaim had waned. In response, he wrote the much-maligned Pierre, a sensational gothic novel about a young man discovering his half-sister and endeavoring to rescue her from poverty. Both sublime and ridiculous, this overly-wrought novel features spiritualism, incest, and diatribes against the literary marketplace, but most pressingly it probes the roles and responsibilities of young independent men in the mid-19th century. If you can find it, the 1995 Kraken edition features bold and brilliant illustrations by Maurice Sendak.
Pierre; or, The Ambiguities is a novel, the seventh book, by American writer Herman Melville, first published in New York in 1852. The plot, which uses many conventions of Gothic fiction, develops the psychological, sexual, and family tensions between Pierre Glendinning; his widowed mother; Glendinning Stanley, his cousin; Lucy Tartan, his fiancee; and Isabel Banford, who is revealed to be his half-sister. According to scholar Henry A. Murray, in writing Pierre Melville "purposed to write his spiritual autobiography in the form of a novel" rather than to experiment with the novel and incidentally working some personal experiences into it. Coming…
In Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction, Hannah Lauren Murray shows that early US authors repeatedly imagined lost, challenged and negated white citizenship in the new nation. Reading canonical and lesser-known writers including Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville, Murray argues that white characters on the borders of life and death were liminal presences that disturbed prescriptions of racial belonging in the early US. Fears of losing whiteness were routinely channelled through the language of liminality, in a precursor to today’s white anxieties of marginalisation and minoritisation.
Avery Mann, a retired pharmaceuticals executive, is in crisis.
His wife dies of cancer, his son’s marriage is on the rocks, his grandson is having a meltdown, and his good friend is a victim of the robocalls scandal that invades the Canadian federal election. Throw in a reckless fling with…
This climate fiction novel follows four generations of women and their battles against a global giant that controls and manipulates Earth’s water. Told mostly through a diary and drawing on scientific observation and personal reflection, Lynna’s story unfolds incrementally, like climate change itself. Her gritty memoir describes a near-future Toronto…
