Introduction / Shirley Samuels
PART I. HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS
National narrative and the problem of American nationhood / J. Gerald Kennedy
Fiction and democracy / Paul Downes
Democratic fictions / Sandra M. Gustafson
Engendering American fictions / Martha J. Cutter, Caroline F. Levander
Race and ethnicity / Robert S. Levine
Sexualities / Valerie Rohy
Education and polemic / Stephanie Foote
Marriage and contract / Naomi Morgenstern
Transatlantic ventures / Wil Verhoeven, Stephen Shapiro
Other languages, other Americas / Kirsten Silva Gruesz
PART II. FORMS OF FICTION
Literary histories / Michael Drexler, Ed White
Breeding and reading: Chesterfieldian civility in the early republic / Christopher Lukasik
The American gothic / Marianne Noble
Sensational fiction / Shelley Streeby
Melodrama and American fiction / Lori Merish
Delicate boundaries: passing and other "crossings" in fictionalized slave narratives / Cherene Sherrard-Johnson
Doctors, bodies, and fiction / Stephanie P. Browner
Law and the American novel / Laura H. Korobkin
Labor and fiction / Cindy Weinstein
Words for children / Carol J. Singley
Dime novels / Colin T. Ramsey, Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola
Reform and antebellum fiction / Chris Castiglia
PART III. AUTHORS, LOCATIONS, PURPOSES
The problem of the city / Heather Roberts
New landscapes / Timothy Sweet
The gothic meets sensation: Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, George Lippard, and E.D.E.N. Southworth / Dana Luciano
Retold legends: Washington Irving, James Kirke Paulding, and John Pendleton Kennedy / Philip Barnard
Captivity and freedom: Ann Eliza Bleecker, Harriet Prescott Spofford, and Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle" / Eric Gary Anderson
New England tales: Catharine Sedgwick, Catherine Brown, and the dislocations of Indian land / Bethany Schneider
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Caroline Lee Hentz, Herman Melville, and American racialist exceptionalism / Katherine Adams
Fictions of the South: southern portraits of slavery / Nancy Buffington
The old southwest: Mike Fink, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Johnson Jones Hooper, and George Washington Harris / David Rachels
James Fenimore Cooper and the invention of the American novel / Wayne Franklin
The sea: Herman Melville and Moby-Dick / Stephanie A. Smith
National narrative and national history / Russ Castronovo.
