Last April, a book by Phillip Gura, professor of American literature at the University of North Carolina, argued that these once-popular, now-overlooked novels are in fact are some of the richest sources available for learning about the themes and great debates of early America. What’s more, purely by looking at the more popular titles from this time, a student might receive a surprisingly diverse and even radical portrait of early 18th- and 19th-century people and morals.

To understand more about Gura’s motivations for this project, encapsulated in Truth’s Ragged Edge: The Rise of the American Novel, and which books he, as an advocate for a more diversified curriculum, has been focusing on, we called him up.

Why did you write this book?

We’ve only been paying attention to all these white male authors even though we’ve been reviving the canon for 30 or 40 years. So what I wanted to do in the book was to look at all the other authors in the period, or as many as I could--to get a sense of the range of authors who were writing about similar kinds of questions and in that sense to highlight the achievements of people like Hawthorne and Melville and others but also to bring out, from the shadows, a lot of writers, particularly women and African Americans, who really were contributing to a very vital literary scene.

One thing I found interesting while reading this book was the fairly radical soul-searching among female novelists and the female characters in their novels very early--right after the Revolution. I wasn’t aware there was a tradition of thinking about women’s issues, women’s sexuality, quite that early.

Well again, this is one of the things I hope the book will do--alert people to these books. What’s nice is that 15-20 years ago this kind of book would have been aimed for a much more academic audience. But now these books are accessible to anyone on their computers. Before you had to go to a rare books library to find them, but now many of them have been scanned or Google has done them. I’ve taught these novels now from the Internet. The canon as we’ve had it was established in the early 20th century by white male academics in fairly elite institutions and they decided which authors they thought most important in the nineteen teens and twenties and the women simply got dropped aside because people like Melville and Hawthorne and Cooper and others seemed to be those who came forward in the most important ways. But in fact the mix of authors who were popular during the period is quite remarkable. Before 1850 there were about 2,800 novels published. If you ask any educated person “who are the novelists before 1850?” you might have the person say three or four names: Hawthorne, Melville, Cooper, Irving, and they might add Harriet Beecher Stowe.

What I did was to read pretty systematically in the important national journals that were emerging and see which books were reviewed, digging into them.