Founded in Fiction: The Uses of Fiction in the Early United States

Anyone who has spent time studying or teaching early US fiction ultimately finds themselves with a conundrum: why do so many of the works we designate as novels stray so far afield of the generic requirements that we associate with the novelistic genre? The simple—perhaps even simplistic—answer to that question has always involved an argument about generic development. Early novelists created work that aimed at verisimilitude, but because they were primitive artists, they were not yet able to achieve the mimetic wizardry of the nineteenth-century novel. Thomas Koenigs's Founded in Fiction provides a more sophisticated and satisfying answer to the question. By restoring “the varied logics of fictional writing that novel history has tended to normalize” (3), Koenigs discloses a history of fiction that is not teleologically driven by the coming-of-age plot that literary scholars know as “The Rise of the Novel.” Instead, Koenigs surveys a range of long narrative...