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The Columbia History of the American NovelAlthough they located the inequalities and incongruences in an American society that claimed to be egalitarian, and although they occasionally undermined cherished beliefs about reason and liberty as the girders of that society, these writers remained wedded to the rhetoric of the Revolution, and thus were still intent upon educating an American readership to be good citizens of the Republic. An unsettled and turbulent nation did not lead to bold products of the imagination, but rather to didactic textbooklike texts that tried to freeze values that were even then in flux. Unlike our own era, which has witnessed a revolution in Latin American and Eastern European fiction, corresponding to an upheaval in the political life in these parts of the world, late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America produced no new forms and configura-14- tions of the novel. Rather, we get not the novel as reflection of its society (one standard definition of the term) but a sham sermon to hold change at bay, mere imitations of older British forms ...» |
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