“Fictions in Print”

Emily Gowen

My current book-project reimagines the transatlantic history of the novel by attending to the multifarious afterlives of canonical early novels in the early United States. In turn, I urge a reconsideration of  these works’ influence over the development of nineteenth-century U.S. literary traditions, and the conceptions of novelistic reading practices and literary genealogies that emerge during this period. Some of the most lasting early prose fictions in literary history—John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), and Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749)—enjoyed robust and heterogeneous recirculation and adaptation in nineteenth-century mass print, but whereas their influence and importance has often been conceived of in terms of an ossifying, interpretively settled canon, I argue that these texts owe their fame and endurance to the ways in which printers, booksellers, and common readers renovated and reimagined them in nineteenth-century print.

A portion of this project was published in American Literature 93.4 and can be read here.