- Offers an overview of early fictional genres and introduces ways to interpret them today
- Features in depth examinations of specific novels
- Explores the social and historical contexts of the time to help the readers' understanding of the stories
- Explores questions of identity - about the novel, its 19th-century readers, and the emerging structure of the United States - as an important backdrop to understanding American fiction
- Profiles the major authors, including Louisa May Alcott, Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, alongside less familiar writers such as Fanny Fern, Caroline Kirkland, George Lippard, Catharine Sedgwick, and E. D. E. N. Southworth
- Selected by Choice as a 2013 Outstanding Academic Title
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"Perhaps only a scholar of Samuel's perspicacity could produce a work that treads familiar textual ground with such startling insight, a work that moves elegantly between its meta-critical concerns and the ingenuity of its close readings. Summing Up: Essential. All readers." (Choice, 1 October 2012)








