TRANSATLANTIC EXCHANGES: THE RISE OF THE EARLY AMERICAN NOVEL

The present article aims to provide a revisionist approach to the early American novel by considering the relation between English models and American imitations, on the one hand, and transatlantic cultural exchanges, on the other, which have contributed to the rise of an autonomous literature whose development was inextricably linked to the founding of the nation. Although the early American novel was a generic extension predicated on eighteenth-century English prototypes, I claim that it struggled to find its own voice in a republic in which novels, along with other fictional material, were deemed as public property and common knowledge, two major prerequisites of Republicanism understood as civic humanism.