The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel: Reading the Atlantic World-System (review)

Reviewed by: The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel: Reading the Atlantic World-System Betsy Klimasmith (bio) Stephen Shapiro. The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel: Reading the Atlantic World-System. University Park: Pennsylvania University State Press, 2008. vii+372pp. US $34.95. ISBN 978-0-271-03291-7. Stephen Shapiro proposes a new paradigm for understanding the early American novel: as the logical form to arise when a major economic shift changed the way in which “America” operated as a player in the global marketplace. Why, Shapiro asks, were so many novels published in the United States in the 1790s, only to fade from the literary marketplace until the late 1810s? Shapiro first posits that the explanatory rubrics structuring many of the most widely accepted literary histories of the period are inadequate to explain the outburst of novel writing in 1790s America, such as the rise of the middle class in America—because class and the novel in America are different from the European models; a revolutionary mindset—it had faded by the 1790s; the rise of liberalism or republicanism—terms too imprecise to be useful; classic accounts of gendered domesticity—anachronistically nineteenth-century; or the New Atlanticism—that remains enmeshed with the nation-state. To understand the emergence of “novelism” in the 1790s or at other historical moments, Shapiro proposes that we see the novel as one of the material products that help to make sense of transitions from one economic model to another. The novel, Shapiro argues, offers writers familiar language and narrative forms through which to understand a new economic reality. Both before and after the American Revolution, the colonies’ economies rose and fell with “the boom-bust cycles of English imperial militarism” (99). After a period of prosperity that accompanied Britain’s military buildup in the late eighteenth century, the new republic was plunged into post-war depression in the 1780s and early 1790s as the shipbuilding industry collapsed, British goods flooded the American marketplace, and restrictive trade policies excluded American ships from potentially lucrative markets, especially in the Caribbean. In the 1790s, however, [End Page 386] as tensions between Britain and France led each country to enact trade embargoes against each other, the United States suddenly found itself perfectly positioned to take advantage of an extremely lucrative re-export market. Facing neither tariffs nor embargoes, American ships carried slaves, sugar, coffee, cocoa, and other highly profitable “goods of sensation” from the West Indies to Europe (102). The effect of this policy shift on the U.S. economy and culture was staggering, and Shapiro convincingly shows how it affected urban architecture and manners, shifting the nation’s centres of population and power. To make sense of these shifts, he argues, American writers made use of and transformed the fading eighteenth-century European narrative form of the novel: “American novelistic production emerges to convey a re-export-associated middle-class experience as a means of compensating for its exclusion from traditional institutions and modes of address” (27). Shaipro’s theory of the early American novel—grounded in the cultural realities of the historical moment and informed by an economic theory that thinks beyond the nation-state—is compelling. The U.S.’s emergence as a re-export republic offers a useful explanation for why the novel emerged (and then faded) when it did; it also shapes a compelling framework for new and exciting readings of the period’s fiction. Shapiro focuses his literary analysis on two novels, Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland and Arthur Mervyn. Of the two, his reading of Mervyn is the more exciting; Mervyn’s Philadelphia setting allows Shapiro to highlight the operations of an urban space in the throes of unsettling re-export growth. Shapiro’s attention to Mervyn’s physical experiences with the products of re-export such as clothes, houses, food, and especially his marriage to Ascha Fielding, allows Shapiro to explore the dynamics of slavery, sensational consumption, sentiment, and sensibility that he identifies as the hallmarks of the re-export era. Because he sets out to explain the burgeoning of American novelism in the 1790s, it seems counterintuitive that Shapiro would examine the work of...

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