Shortly after the close of the American Revolution – at first in magazines, beginning with Jeremy Belknap's nationalist allegory The Foresters, serialized in Philadelphia's Columbian Magazine in 1787, and soon following in book form, beginning with William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy in 1789 – American writers and printers unleashed a surge of native fiction that often but not always self-identified as “novels.” Although this surge gained momentum through the turn of the century, domestic productions in the novel still did not come close to rivaling the numbers and popularity of foreign imports and reprints available from booksellers and circulating libraries. As Paul Giles indicates in this volume, accounts of the American novel – whether nationalist accounts or accounts of developing nationalism – that fail to consider the totality of writing consumed by early American readers inevitably fail to comprehend the character of these first American fictions.

The tendency toward reading the “national” over other contexts has been particularly true of critics of Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810), a Philadelphia native born to Quaker parents on the eve of the war. Brown's six novels – published between 1798 and 1801 – have most often been treated by literary historians as indices of American character, political con.ict, and nascent nationalism. Such approaches often take writers rather than readers as key subjects, making Brown one among a handful of writers who advocated – successfully or not – for some distinctively American traits in the new nation's literary productions; they also take for granted Brown's status as representative of an incipient “American novel” tradition and, at times, of the new nation's public sphere or literary culture as a whole.

Something which concerns themselves

The French traveler and critic Alexis de Tocqueville likely had in mind New York City theaters like the Bowery and the Park when he wrote, in Democracy in America (1835), that

Tocqueville's description indicates the ways in which the early theater in New York (as in larger cities such as London or Paris) both accommodated all classes and segregated them in carefully demarcated architectural spaces, the “pit” on the floor and the private “boxes” - belonging to wealthy subscribers - above and to the sides. He doesn't mention the third space common to early New York theaters, the “gallery,” made up of balcony seating that reached up to nosebleed heights, including a “third tier” that often housed prostitutes and their customers. The “gallery gods,” young workingclass patrons, were commonly understood to rule theaters by threatening to shower food or even furniture on performers or viewers in other portions of the house.

In the mid-1940s, the New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell created a 93-year old resident of the South Street Seaport named Hugh G. Flood - not quite antediluvian and not quite postdiluvian, either. He was a “tough Scotch-Irishman,” a composite of “several old men” Mitchell knew from the Fulton Fish Market. The “truthful rather than factual” sketches Mitchell wrote about Mr. Flood were “stories of fish-eating, whiskey, death, and rebirth.” The title character, an inveterate consumer of freshly imported seafood, dispenses wisdom on topics such as the medicinal properties of oysters (including where to find the best ones in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn) and complains that scientists have ruined the most basic foods (he gives Mitchell's narrator the inside scoop on where to find a decent, old-fashioned loaf of bread on Elizabeth Street). Like Mitchell's other writing for the New Yorker, these stories featured people and places representative of older, threatened, but persistent remnants of the city's past. Mitchell's Mr. Flood is a “retired house-wrecking contractor,” a participant in the never-ending capitalist ritual of tearing things down to put new things up: “creative destruction,” as the economist Joseph Schumpeter, a contemporary of Mitchell's, put it.