UCLA

Over the past thirty years, the expansion of the literary canon has enriched Americanist critics’ sense for what sorts of stories make up the nineteenth-century novel. Our basic narrative about what happens to the novel over the span of the century, however, has remained staunchly in place: the novel rises. The terms of the rise vary, but the model abides, carried over from Cathy Davidson’s Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (1986) into Philip F. Gura’s Truth’s Ragged Edge: The Rise of the American Novel (2013). This dissertation contends that it is time to replace the rise model. Thinking the nineteenth-century novel through its system of subgenres, it presents a broad and conceptually coherent account of the novel’s midcentury flourishing.

Around 1840, the novel triumphs—over readers and writers alike. If the novel rises, it squashes too; new novels “drop down by millions all over our land,” quips one critic, overwhelmed in 1847. At this moment, the novel must learn do for a mass audience what a master-reader no longer can: contextualize and conceptualize the ways its instances plummet, jostle, clump, and spread. Major subgenres of the novel develop themselves, I show, by developing different techniques for attaching their instances to one another and detaching them from instances of other subgenres. Sentimental novels prosper by the conventionalisms of plot and character they share. The bildungsroman, a story of individual development, strives instead to appear in a condensed, paradigmatic instance. Gothic novels scatter into sub-subgenres (like city mysteries or detective fiction), improvised clusters that momentarily absorb and redirect the impulse to scatter further. And the novels of American literary realism emphasize the autonomy of each work, its simple difference from other stories in a world full of other stories. A system of love proclivities or erotic shapes subtends these subgenres. The place, I claim, where the generic dynamics that define nineteenth-century novels can be observed most clearly and creatively is the love plot.