Fictionality and the Novel in the Early United States

Early US writers gave a great deal of thought to the fictionality of fiction. This preoccupation with fictionality had a profound effect on the development of prose fiction in general and the novel in particular in the United States. In the decades following the American Revolution, nearly every US novel and fiction self-consciously reflected on its own fictionality. Faced with a prevailing anxiety that reading fiction would corrupt young readers by misleading them about reality, early American novelists often used such metafictional reflections to argue for the educative, moral, and political utility of their works. The widespread concerns about fiction made early American fictionists hyperattentive to the specific formal and epistemological affordances of fiction, and they developed novel theories of fiction’s value in conversation with the ubiquitous critiques of fiction and novels. By the 1820s, the antifictional discourse had waned significantly, but American novelists and fictionists continued to self-consciously reflect on the fictionality of their works. Across the antebellum period, these reflections served as occasions for writers to justify their particular theory or use of fiction. This was especially evident in those fictions that broke with the increasingly ascendant conception of fiction reading as a vehicle for private moral and aesthetic self-culture. In an era when writers and social movements sought to harness fiction for an incredible range of social and political projects, fictionality served as a site where fictionists and critics debated the appropriate uses of fiction. Fictionality was one of the defining concerns of the American novel from its origin through the middle of the 19th century.