Books, Literature & Fiction, United States, 18th Century

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Ann Charters
The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction
by Bedford/St Martins (Paperback)

During her many years of teaching introduction to fiction courses, Ann Charters developed an acute sense of which stories work most effectively in the classroom. She also discovered that writers, not editors, have the most interesting and useful things to say about the making and the meaning of fiction. Accordingly, her choice of fiction in the first edition of her The Story and Its Writer was as notable for its student appeal as it was for its quality and range. And to complement these stories, she introduced a lasting innovation: an array of the writers' own commentaries on the craft and traditions of the short story. In subsequent editions her sense of what works was confirmed as the book evolved into the most comprehensive, diverse-- and bestselling -- introduction to fiction anthology. Instructors rely on Ann Charters' ability to assemble an authoritative and teachable anthology, and anticipate each edition's selection of new writers and stories.

William Hill Brown, Hannah Webster Foster
The Power of Sympathy and The Coquette (Penguin Classics)
by Penguin Classics (Paperback)

Written in epistolary form and drawn from actual events, The Power of Sympathy (1789) and The Coquette (1797) were two of the earliest novels published in America. William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy reflects eighteenth-century America's preoccupation with the role of women as safekeepers of the country's morality. A novel about the dangers of succumbing to sexual temptations and the rewards of resistance, it was meant to promote women's moral rectitude, and the letters through which the story is told are filled with advice on the proper relationships between the sexes. Like The Power of Sympathy, Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette is concerned with womanly virtue. Eliza Wharton is eager to enjoy a bit of freedom before settling down to domestic life and begins a flirtation with the handsome, rakish Sanford. Their letters trace their relationship from its romantic beginnings to the transgression that inevitably brings their exclusion from proper society. In her ...

Rebecca Rush
Kelroy: A Novel (Early American Women Writers)
by Oxford University Press, USA (Paperback)

The Early American Women Writers series offers rare works of fiction by eighteenth- and nineteenth century women, each reprinted in its entirety, each introduced by Cathy N. Davidson, who places it in an historical and literary perspective. Ranging from serious cautionary tales about moral corruption to amusing and trenchant social satire, these novels provide today's reader with a unique window into the earliest American popular fiction and way of life. Set in Philadelphia, elroy focuses on the limited options for women in early nineteenth century America. The plot revolves around the dilemma of Mrs. Hamilton, who is suddenly left penniless by the unexpected death of her wealthy husband. Not willing to live in poverty, Mrs. Hamilton sees as her only available recourse her two unmarried daughters. As the daughters make the rounds of the marriage market and suffer the machinations of their mother, Kelroy exposes the contradictions of class interest and the profound ...

Leonard Cline
The Dark Chamber
by Cold Spring Press (Mass Market Paperback)

Don Pendleton
Hour Of Judgment (The Executioner)
by Gold Eagle (Mass Market Paperback)

Michelle Burnham
Captivity and Sentiment: Cultural Exchange in American Literature, 1682-1861 (Reencounters With Colonialism)
by Dartmouth (Paperback)

Examines how traditional dichotomies give way to emergent cultural forms in the literature of captivity.

Elizabeth Barnes
States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel
by Columbia University Press (Hardcover)

From the Declaration of Independence to the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne and the poetry of Wait Whitman, American writers have etched an archetypal character into the national psyche. For centuries the "rugged individual" was thought to be the keystone of the national identity, informing history, culture, literature, and democracy. But is this belief illusionary? Is American identity more collectively defined? With insightful readings of early American novels, Elizabeth Barnes challenges the traditional concept of American self-identity and the underpinnings of American life. In place of the masculine "rugged individual" she reveals a more social, cooperative American. Barnes identifies a collective identity consciously fashioned by early writers who held to the Enlightenment belief that bonds of sympathy were the strongest foundation of a republican democracy. Authors like Hawthorne and Susanna Rawson, Barnes argues, employed a sentimental rhetorical strategy that engendered ...

Julia A. Stern
The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel
by University Of Chicago Press (Hardcover)

American novels written in the wake of the Revolution overflow with self-conscious theatricality and impassioned excess. In The Plight of Feeling, Julia A. Stern shows that these sentimental, melodramatic, and gothic works can be read as an emotional history of the early republic, reflecting the hate, anger, fear, and grief that tormented the Federalist era.Stern argues that these novels gave voice to a collective mourning over the violence of the Revolution and the foreclosure of liberty for the nation's noncitizens—women, the poor, Native and African Americans. Properly placed in the context of late eighteenth-century thought, the republican novel emerges as essentially political, offering its audience gothic and feminized counternarratives to read against the dominant male-authored accounts of national legitimation.Drawing upon insights from cultural history and gender studies as well as psychoanalytic, narrative, and genre theory, Stern convincingly exposes the foundation ...

Alexander Hamilton
The History of the Ancient and Honorable Tuesday Club (Three Volume Set)
by University of North Carolina Press (Hardcover)

The Tuesday Club: A Shorter Edition of The History of the Ancient and Honorable Tuesday Club by Dr. Alexander Hamilton (Maryland Paperback Bookshelf)
by The Johns Hopkins University Press (Hardcover)

"Irrelevant erudition, happy insult, and plain silliness... In parts it is remarkably funny, and filled with wonderful lampooning and absurd event. The crude illustrations, done with pen-and-wash, are full of jollity and life."--Times Literary Supplement.When in 1745 Dr. Alexander Hamilton (no relation to Washington's treasury secretary) founded the Tuesday Club of Annapolis, he hoped to bring part of the culture of his native Edinburgh to this "barbarous and desolate corner of the world." For the next eleven years Hamilton scrupulously recorded the often tumultuous meetings of a club whose only sacrosanct bylaw was that no serious question could be given a serious answer. The result was a voluminous account rich with colorful detail and brimming with good humor, literary parody, tongue-in-cheek cultural criticism, and pointed political satire. First published in 1990 in a three-volume edition that won widespread critical acclaim, this remarkable literary and cultural document is ...

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