The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World

In a work of impressive range and depth, Amanda Claybaugh focuses on the exchanges and reciprocal influences of American and English novelists of the nineteenth century. Several concentric arguments thread through Claybaugh's book, but the most foundational is the contention that English-language print culture in the nineteenth century was above all transnational, bound together by transatlantic reprinting, circulation, and mutual influence. And of all these connective links, social reform, Claybaugh argues, was particularly potent in binding together the two nations and their literatures, functioning as a 'central conduit for these exchanges'.... The Novel of Purpose is densely packed with finely honed arguments and observations, but a few points merit mention. First, Claybaugh's discussion of realism is a refreshing and important contribution to a well-worked-over field. With admirable poise, she offers a precise and clear definition of realism, distinguishes Anglo-American from continental realism, and charts the complicated history of realist criticism over the last several decades.... The Novel of Purpose is well written, impressively researched, and wide ranging. Claybaugh offers an important and long overdue analysis of this novelistic genre, and her book deserves to rank among the finest recent contributions to transnational literary history.

The Novel of Purpose is a major contribution to the study of nineteenth-century literature on both sides of the Atlantic-one, moreover, that provides innovative and timely insight into the complex relationship between aesthetic production and political engagement.

In The Novel of Purpose, Amanda Claybaugh makes a number of illuminating and convincing connections between the literary and reform traditions of England and those of the United States. This book provides sharp insights into the performative nature of 'the novel of purpose,' showing how reformist intentions, even when they were disavowed or domesticated, helped establish national structures of feeling that were circulated transnationally. Claybaugh examines her subjects with clarity and ease.

The Novel of Purpose offers a wonderfully incisive and provocative account of the links between social reform and novelistic realism in nineteenth-century Britain and America. As it makes the case for a distinctive Anglo-American realism shaped by common reformist goals within a single literary marketplace, Amanda Claybaugh's work transforms our understanding not only of the nineteenth-century novel, but also of the very idea of the transatlantic.

This is a wide-ranging, learned, elegant, and subtle book that makes an original contribution to the presently burgeoning field of Anglophone literary and cultural studies by adopting a transatlantic perspective on the generative relationship between social reform and the emergence of literary realism.