American Narrative Beginnings: Time and the Nation in Antebellum Short Fiction

Working against the conventional wisdom that the novel brought about the professionalization of American letters, "American Narrative Beginnings: Time and the Nation in Antebellum Short Fiction" examines how tales and sketches responded to antebellum calls to celebrate the American past as a means of establishing a distinct American literature. Spanning the years of 1819 to 1845, this project traces the rise and fall of what I call the "antebellum culture of beginnings." After the War of 1812, especially with the rout of the British at the Battle of New Orleans, Americans felt a surge of nationalistic pride and desired jingoistic cultural production. As the years passed, however, sectional tensions and eventually civil war made celebrations of American beginnings feel anachronistic. In response to these shifting pressures, Washington Irving, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe all used short fiction to probe the nature of historical and narrative beginnings. Although Irving found it difficult to separate fully the American from the British past within his collection, he ultimately argued that the American past was vital and dynamic in the first transatlantic bestseller written by a native-born American. Sedgwick, though often employing narrative techniques that shut women out of stories about the American past, used tales and sketches to write females into male-centered origin narratives. Hawthorne, meanwhile, contemplated the paradox of representing accurately the historical record while writing popular historical fiction about culturally glorified figures like the Puritans. Finally, I suggest that Poe responded to the widespread fascination with origins by inventing the "whodunit," a genre that displaces the beginning (the crime) to the narrative's end. Ultimately, "American Beginnings" demonstrates that the tale and the sketch provide a means by which to reevaluate the beginning of American professional authorship, the rise of American letters, and the importance of short fiction.