Hard Facts Setting and Form in the American Novel [Paperback]

American culture has often been described in terms of paradigmatic images--the wilderness, the Jeffersonian landscape of family farms, the great industrial cities at the turn of the 19th century. But underlying these cultural ideals are less happy paradoxes. Settling the land meant banishing the Indians and destroying the wilderness; Jeffersonian landscapes were created with the help of the new country's enslaved citizens; and economic opportunities in the cities were purchased at the high price of self-commercialization. In this study of the popular 19th- and early 20th-century American novel, Philip Fisher demonstrates how such works as Dreiser'sSister CarrieandAn American Tragedy, Stowe'sUncle Tom's Cabinand Cooper'sThe Deerslayerworked to make these three hard facts of the 19th-century American experience familiar and tolerable--or familiar and intolerable--to their wide audience of readers. His perceptive analysis proves that the most important cultural work was accomplished not by novels generally taken to be at the core of the American literary canon--those of Hawthorne, Melville, or Twain--but rather by books which never abandoned the ambition to be widely read.

Fisher makes striking observations about the cultural function of literature....[His] readings are based on a deep knowledge of literary and social theory, and he manages to make the theory his own. The result is a form of historical criticism that reformulates familiar subjects (the wilderness, the homestead, the city) so as to raise a wholly new set of questions. --Western Humanities Review

The study of American fiction of the 19th century has long been a business of reclamation.... Fisher's fascinating extension of this campaign in his treatment of Cooper and Stowe draws partly on previous pioneering efforts like Leslie A. Fiedler'sLove and Death in the American Noveland Leo Marx'sThe Machine in the Garden, l#×