some other American novels from this time period:
Christopher Pearse Cranch: The Last of the Huggermuggers.
The first of the children's books by the poet and humorist-among the few original fairy stories written in nineteenth-century America-is a Gulliver-like tale of a shipwrecked sailor on an island inhabited by two giants. Kobboltzo (1857), its sequel, deals with an evil dwarf living on the same island.
Caroline Lee Hentz: Ernest Linwood; or, The Inner Life of the Author.
The author's most autobiographical novel, about a woman married to an insanely jealous man and the struggle between domesticity and having a career as an author.
Mary Jane Holmes (1825-1907): Lena Rivers.
The most famous work of the prolific and popular author concerns a young girl, orphaned when her father disappears, who is accused of wrongdoing and is sent from her country village in Massachusetts to live with wealthy, snobbish relatives in Kentucky.
Mary Hayden Green Pike: Caste: A Story of Republican Equality.
Among the author's best-known writings, the novel tells the story of a brother and sister who suffer many hardships when their African American ancestry is discovered. The popular book is published under the pseudonym Sydney A. Story and is particularly controversial for highlighting prejudice against African Americans in the North.
William Gilmore Simms: Charlemont; or, The Pride of the Village.
An expansion of the beginning of his earlier novel Beauchampe (1842), detailing the seduction of Margaret Cooper by Wharham Sharp, a young attorney disguised as a theological student. After he breaks his promise of marriage and her illegitimate child dies, she vows to kill Warham. The work is based on the Kentucky crime involving Anna Cook and her husband Jeroboam O. Beauchamp, who killed Colonel Solomon P. Sharp.
Catharine Maria Sedgwick: Married or Single? Written to justify single womanhood, this novel considers the various pursuits that can be undertaken by unmarried women, though in the end Sedgwick's heroine finds happiness in matrimony. Sedgwick's final novel is described by the North American Review to be "both in an artistical and ethical point of view, the best of the series that bears her name."
John Townsend Trowbridge (1827-1916): Neighbor Jackwood. An antislavery novel by the Boston author of juvenile literature about the beautiful Camille Delisard, the daughter of a Frenchman and his slave, who is sold after her father is killed by his wife. She escapes to Vermont, where she is protected from a villain who wants to claim her as a fugitive slave. She then marries her rescuer, Hector Dunbury. The work, Trowbridge's first success, is considered notorious for the marriage between the white hero and the multiracial heroine.
Frank J. Webb (fl. 1857): The Garies and Their Friends. One of the earliest novels by a black American, portraying a white Southern aristocrat and his mulatto wife and a middle-class black family, is considered the first fictional work to describe free Northern blacks, a lynch mob in a free state, a mixed marriage, and the theme of passing for white.
Nathaniel Parker Willis: Paul Fane; or, Parts of a Life Else Untold. The only novel written by the writer hailed by his contemporaries as a distinguished American poet is the story of a young artist who is cherished by women for his talent, though scorned as a social inferior. It is an allegory of the relationship between American and European society.
Martin R. Delany: Blake; or, The Huts of America. Delany's only novel, partially serialized in the Afro-American Magazine, fully serialized in the Weekly Anglo-African (1861-1862), and published in book form in 1870, describes a slave rebellion in Cuba and the South. Its protagonist is the first fully developed West Indian character in American fiction, and the book is considered the most radical black novel of the nineteenth century. Its themes of militancy and black nationalism anticipate the views of black fiction of the 1960s and 1970s.
Augusta Jane Evans: Beulah. Popular with critics and the public, selling twenty-two thousand copies in its first nine months, this domestic novel concerns a young girl's unrequited love for her guardian. Her religious questioning leads her to read Poe, Emerson, Goethe, Locke, Descartes, Hume, and others.
Harriet E. Adams Wilson (c. 1827-c. 1863): Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House, North, Showing That Slavery's Shadows Fall Even There. The first novel published in the United States by a black American goes unnoticed until rediscovered by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in 1983. The slave narrative tells the story of Frado, the daughter of a black man and white woman, who becomes an indentured servant after her father dies and her mother deserts her. It details the many hardships of her life, including abuse by her owner and abandonment by her husband while she is pregnant.
― Muswell Hillbilly Elegy (President Keyes), Wednesday, 13 May 2020 18:38 (three years ago) link
feel like this is a judgement you can only make if you've actually read most of the deep cuts I've been including (many of which are obscure merely by being outside of the UK/USA/France/Russia circuit)? I haven't either, of course.
alternatively, the 13th floor elevators are only interesting if you're committed to the interestingness of some particular and basic rock moves (whereas dylan and the stones are interesting beyond them)
similarly, a lot of british prose fiction of the 19th c is probably interesting if you're committed to the interestingness of the basic moves of victorian narrative
tho idk if trollope is the 13th floor elevators or the stones of this analogy
― the ghost of tom, choad (thomp), Friday, 15 May 2020 12:38 (three years ago) link
ten months pass...