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The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel: Reading the Atlantic World-system by Stephen Shapiro (Paperback, 2009)

Taking his cue from Philadelphia-born velist Charles Brockden Brown's Annals of Europe and America , which contends that America is shaped most ticeably by the international struggle between Great Britain and France for control of the world trade market, Stephen Shapiro charts the advent, decline, and reinvigoration of the early American vel. That the American vel 'sprang so unexpectedly into published existence during the 1790s' may be a reflection of the beginning of the end of Franco-British supremacy and of the power of a middle class riding the crest of a new world ecomic system. Shapiro's world-systems approach is a relatively new methodology for literary studies, but it brings two particularly useful features to the table. First, it refines the conceptual frameworks for analyzing cultural and social history, such as the rise in sentimentalism, in relation to a long-wave ecomic history of global commerce; second, it fosters a new model for a comparative American Studies across time. Rather than relying on contiguous time, a world-systems approach might compare the cultural production of one region to ather at the same location within the recurring cycle in an ecomic reconfiguration. Shapiro offers a way of thinking about the causes for the emergence of the American vel that suggests a fresh approach to the paradigms shaping American Studies.

Place of Publication
Pennsylvania
Spine
23mm
Content Note
Frontispiece
Author Biography
Stephen Shapiro is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.
Date of Publication
20/05/2009
Country of Publication
United States
Genre
Literary Criticism

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