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Nancy Armstrong is the Gilbert, Louis, and Edward Lehrman Professor of English at Duke University. She is author of How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719-1900 and Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism. Leonard Tennenhouse is Professor of English at Duke University. He is author of several books, most recently, The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750-1850. Together, Armstrong and Tennenhouse are authors of The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life.
List of contents
Introduction.
Argumentum ad PopulumChapter 1. Style in the Time of Epidemic Writing
Chapter 2. Refiguring the Social Contract
Chapter 3. Novels as a Form of Democratic Writing
Chapter 4. Dispersal
Chapter 5. Population
Chapter 6. Conversion
Chapter 7. Hubs
Chapter 8. Anamorphosis
Chapter 9. Becoming National Literature
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments
About the author
Nancy Armstrong is the Gilbert, Louis, and Edward Lehrman Professor of English at Duke University. She is author of How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719-1900 and Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism. Leonard Tennenhouse is Professor of English at Duke University. He is author of several books, most recently, The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750-1850. Together, Armstrong and Tennenhouse are authors of The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life.
Summary
In the decades after U.S. independence, American novelists carried on an argument that pitted direct democracy against the representative liberalism they attributed to their British counterparts. The result was an American novel distinguished by its use of narrative tropes that generated a social system resembling today's distributed network.
