Truth's Ragged Edge: The Rise of the American Novel - Hardcover

An enthralling work of literary recovery . . . If you think that academics now only write for each other, this book will come as a revelation . . . In his acknowledgments, Gura writes that his book was partly inspired by Edmund Wilson's magisterial Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War. Future scholars will be comparably inspired by Truth's Ragged Edge. Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Comprehensive and fresh . . . spirited . . . [Truth s Ragged Edge is] driven by a desire to encourage a new generation to read a forgotten trove of writing. The Times Literary Supplement Lucid . . . a rewarding and reliable guide. Michael Gorra, The Wall Street Journal Fascinating . . . a nimble synthesis of a vital period in literary history, tracing our homegrown novel's evolution from morality tale to self-aware interiority, traversing and incorporating the countless currents of regionalism, faith, urbanization, and exploration that swept across the nation's early decades. The Weekly Standard Certain to become a new classic . . . a masterful examination of the origins of the distinctive American novel . . . a must read for the serious book lover who wishes to understand how the novel became so manifestly American, to understand how strikingly American thought evolved and created a form widely divergent from its European origins . . . Truth's Ragged Edge is a major contribution to literary criticism and will be read and appreciated in American studies classes for years to come. About.com [Gura] breathes new life into old and largely forgotten novels . . . this book creatively revives the age of ecstatic religion, the steam locomotive, and the daguerreotype. It charts the steady rise of female authorship and of a book-hungry American middle class. It captures the movement, as one later chapter heading reads, from a theology of the feelings to an ethic of love.' And it contrasts with the thoughtless dependence of generations reared on soap operas and video games, recovering the unfamiliar contours of a stricter society that somehow gave birth to a thoughtful individualism. The Advocate (Baton Rouge) Gura provides a long-awaited new map of American fiction. The American Scholar Literary criticism on a grand scale. Harvard Magazine Nostalgic, inclusive, and a lot of fun. Packed with information about all the weird and wonderful 19th-century novels Americans have never read . . . provides a uniquely retro (19th century) summer reading list . . . [Gura's] principle of selection is expansive, giving pride of place to a sprawling archive of popular domestic and sentimental novels. Los Angeles Review of Books Those who agree with Hemingway's claim that Huckleberry Finn created all modern American fiction will find this study of our pre-Twain literary tradition illuminating . . . Gura tempers this book's thrill of discovery over forgotten voices and stories with a still-relevant warning that the fearless individualism of American fiction can come dangerously close to solipsism. Publishers Weekly An outstanding book. Library Journal Philip F. Gura has written the most ambitious, most comprehensive study ever attempted of American fiction from its beginnings to 1868. You will find here some novelists you've never heard of alongside old friends such as Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville. By looking at novels thematically, and in the light of American religious history, Gura has produced a profoundly new kind of literary history, one linked beyond dispute to American theological concerns and American religious life. This book will change the way you look at the American novel. A grand achievement. Robert D. Richardson, Bancroft Prize winning author of William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism Updated literary history at its very best. By assimilating recent rediscoveries of Afro-American and women's fictions--and adding new insights and new titles of his own--Philip F. Gura has given us the only comprehensive study of the tumultuous, ever-growing marketplace of the early American novel. He shows us how the sentimental' tradition of women's domestic fiction became an unexpected vehicle for conveying spiritual and social heresy. John McWilliams, College Professor, Middlebury College Most modern-day readers wander into early American fiction as if it were the back lot of an old movie studio--full of strangely garbed frontiersmen ready for wilderness adventure. Truth's Ragged Edge brilliantly brings us face-to-face with dozens of fictional characters much more like us--urban, introspective, worried about moral survival in a money-grubbing society. Philip F. Gura's book has created a new genealogy of American anxiety. Richard Rabinowitz, President, American History Workshop Philip F. Gura's capacious book offers insightful literary analyses, deft book summaries, and concise biographies of authors that will be of great use to those interested in American fiction during its formative period. David S. Reynolds, award-winning author of Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography Truth's Ragged Edge will allow you to reengage the classic novelists of the nineteenth century and to discover the long-neglected ones as well. Philip F. Gura packs a wealth of information about the early American novel into this illuminating study, and he writes movingly about novelists wrestling with the ideals and realities of democratic liberalism. Robert S. Levine, General Editor, The Norton Anthology of American Literature"

Philip F. Gura's Truth's Ragged Edge is perhaps the first comprehensive study of the early American novel since Richard Chase's 1957 classic, The American Novel and Its Tradition. Gura opens with the first truly home-grown genre of fiction: religious tracts, short parables intended to instruct the Christian reader. He then turns to the city novels of the 1840s, which depicted with mixed feelings the rapid growth and modernization of American society. He concludes with fresh interpretations of the introspective novels that appeared before the Civil War, such as those by Hawthorne and by Melville, from whom Gura takes his title. The grand narrative sweep of the book is balanced by Gura's great insight that the early novel never fully left its origins behind, even as it evolved - it remained a means of theological and philosophical dispute, and reflected the oldest and deepest divisions in American Christianity, politics, and culture. In addition to discussing novels that are considered classics, Gura recovers many novels - by authors as diverse as the evangelical writer Susan Warner, the African American novelist Frank J. Webb, and the early feminist novelist Elizabeth Stoddard - that will be revelations to the contemporary reader. Panoramic and original, Truth's Ragged Edge is an indispensable guide to the origins and development of the American novel and will become a standard book on its subject.