on Founded in Fiction

Mary Bradford (MB): Since the audience for our interviews is largely graduate students and many of us are writing our dissertations or our “first books,” we’d like to start by asking about the book’s development. How did it develop? Did it start as your dissertation project? Did it take a new form after the dissertation? What different lives has the book seen or had?

Thomas Koenigs (TK): The book was based on my dissertation. In some ways, it originated in a seminar paper I wrote for a course very early in graduate school. At the time, I thought I was going to write my dissertation on American modernism, but I ended up getting pulled backward in history. I was taking two classes at the same time: one on the 18th-century British novel and one on early national American literature. For the latter course, I wrote a paper that began with the most “sophomore English paper” topic ever—I was asking, “Why is Brockden Brown so obsessed with Richardson’s Clarissa in books like Wieland?” This led me down this rabbit hole of different theories of fictional didacticism. Eventually, the answer I came up with was that Brown saw the fictionality of fiction as fundamental to its didactic efficacy—that is, he understood fiction as educating readers through the modes of speculative reasoning fictionality encouraged. Then, once I had seized upon that, I started noticing this preoccupation with the question of fictionality and instrumental uses of fictionality all over early American literature. I became fascinated by these often strange, weird theories of fiction that seemed so different from anything I was familiar with from later periods. This pulled me back into the 18th and 19th centuries and became the origin point for the dissertation. My whole area of study transformed because of this seminar paper. The book definitely lived many different lives and took many other shapes. The dissertation looks nothing like the published book. The book is still on the longer side, but the dissertation was truly a loose, baggy monster where I was just trying to cram everything I could into it to make my case and thinking very little about the questions of audience that are so important for a scholarly book. So, the book required immense revision between the dissertation and its eventual publication; I added some material, but I also had to do a lot of streamlining and condensing.

Colby Townsend (CT): How did the process of pitching the project to and finding a university press influence how you revised the manuscript? Were there theoretical or analytical changes in your manuscript that you made in order to fit the editor or press better?

TK: That’s a really good question. The book changed immensely just from thinking about audience in general terms. The dissertation was just me trying to get my argument down, as much for myself as anyone else, providing all the evidence I could and working out these analytical frameworks. Recasting the dissertation as a book manuscript was really a matter of thinking about “how am I going to present this to an audience? How am I going to make this interesting as well as persuasive?” The analytical framework of the project didn’t change much during revision—it was more a process of refining it, of putting the project’s central claims more directly in conversation with what was happening in Americanist literary studies more broadly. The book draws much of its inspiration from recent work in novel theory and narrative theory, fields that are more prevalent in 18th-century British studies than in early American studies. (There are, of course, a lot of important exceptions to this—Jordan Stein’s fantastic When Novels Were Books comes immediately to mind.) I think that one thing I was doing during the revision process was trying to articulate the stakes of this body of scholarship for addressing more central questions to Americanist literary studies in recent years. For most of the revision process, I wasn’t working with a particular press in mind so much as trying to write a book that I could pitch to a variety of university presses. I was very lucky to work with Anne Savarese at Princeton U.P., who is incredible. Founded in Fiction is rather long for a first book, and presses have different degrees of appetite for that. I believed that the scope of the book was crucial for the argument that I wanted to make, so finding a press that would be open to taking a chance on publishing a longer book from a first-time author was important. I’m very grateful to Princeton for doing that.

MB: I’m fascinated by what you just brought up concerning the book’s stakes and how you enter these stakes into a discussion with both the “rise of the novel” strand of criticism and scholarship that was happening in American Studies. While combining these two fields of criticism, the book also centers marginal works of American literature instead of focusing solely on canonical works of early American fiction. How did you approach the varied projects of the book? And, how did the rather broad scope condition, or limit, what you were able to argue?

TK: I love that question. In some ways, the two parts of the book you just mentioned are fundamentally related. I feel like I couldn’t have made the book’s argument about the limitations of the “rise of the novel” narrative for understanding the history of early American fiction without looking at all these weird, marginal works that have been neglected. In some ways, the “rise of the novel” narrative is propped up by a focus on these more familiar fictions, and once we expand our view, it shows us the inadequacy of the “rise of the novel” as a way of understanding the history and development of American fiction writ large. So, on one hand, it was a real challenge balancing all the different ambitions of this book. On the other hand, I feel like the broad literary historical scope was fundamental to making the kind of metacritical argument in which the book was really invested.

CT: I’ve been trying to think through the use of the phrase, “the rise of the novel.” I went into the book expecting it to be a strong pushback against theories about the “rise of the novel,” but you explicitly say in the book you are not going to do that but extend and modify it. For readers new to the concept of the rise of the novel, would you describe how scholars use the term “rise” in this oft-repeated phrase and comment on how your study both complements and problematizes theories of the “rise of the novel”?

TK:  Absolutely! That’s a really accurate description of how I’m trying to approach that question in the book. So, the “rise of the novel” is given somewhat different emphasis in different scholarly studies. I take it, in general, to refer to the broad historical emergence in the 18th century of this new genre, the novel, or at least the stabilization and conventionalization of this genre over that century. (Being an Americanist allows me to sidestep the vexed questions of origin because early US writers are inheriting a recognizable novelistic tradition from England, Scotland, and France: my book doesn’t wade into the controversies about if the novel is truly an eighteenth-century invention.) I think the phrase “rise of the novel” often refers to the novel’s historical emergence, its rapid increase in popularity and prestige across the early nineteenth century, and its cultural preeminence by the mid-19th century. On some level, this literary historical narrative is irrefutable, and you can trace this very clearly in the US context with respect to how the novel gains acceptance. But while one of the things that my book is doing is telling that story in a new way, it also argues that focusing solely on the novel genre leads us to miss out on all these other fictional works that don’t necessarily conform to what we eventually understand the novel to become. So, one thing I’m trying to trace in the book is also what I call “the novelization of American fiction.” That’s the idea that one of the things that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century is a more capacious understanding of what a novel is. It’s defined by three characteristics: length, prose, and fictionality. This extensive understanding of the novel gets back-projected onto these earlier periods, where there was much more attention to generic distinction. And, our own really capacious understanding of what a novel is leads us often to treat these claims to generic distinction from the novel—all these early American fictions that insist they’re not novels—as disingenuous disavowals of a suspicious genre because we think it’s obviously a novel because that’s what our definition of the novel is. One of the things I wanted to do in this book was to take those claims of generic distinction seriously. I’m trying to recover what it means to insist that you’re not writing a novel in the 1780s or 90s and what purpose this claim to generic distinction might serve. So as I see it, the problem with “rise of the novel” narratives for understanding early American literary history isn’t that the novel doesn’t gain prominence over this period but that we are teleologically consolidating a bunch of different extranovelistic fictions—fictions that insisted they weren’t novels!—under this capacious generic umbrella of the novel, and this obscures something important about the terms on which these fictions were trying to address readers or undertake a political project or do all manner of different things.

MB: As you just mentioned, you spend some time discussing how the novel comes to be defined both societally and by authors themselves over the course of the 19th century. At the same time, your book contends with other genres that are being defined under what we might now call “the umbrella of the novel.” In doing so, you’re inheriting the critical tradition of defining the gothic novel, the historical novel versus the historical romance, the social reform novel, and the sentimental novel. To what extent did inheriting the critical frameworks of 19th-century genres affect the arguments made about these novels?

TK: That’s a really insightful question. First of all, I tried as much as possible to use the generic categories and definitions circulating in the mid-nineteenth century. I actually think that’s useful in resisting this kind of teleological back projection of a later understanding of the novel, and one of the things I really wanted to do by focusing on those different sub-genres was capture the variety of different instrumental uses of fictionality that fall outside of this sense of the inherent aesthetic orientation of fiction and the novel. If you look back at like older, mid-20th-century histories of American fiction, you often encounter dismissals of works like these, not necessarily the historical novels, but certainly a lot of the didactic fiction and the reform novels. These critics didn’t just dismiss these fictions as bad works of art—though they often made such judgments—but also claimed that these nineteenth-century authors failed to understand the purpose of fiction by using it for such instrumental ends. One of the things I want to do by turning back to these nineteenth-century generic definitions is recover all the novel and exciting conceptions of fictionality’s value and use that were developed not in the context of literary art but with an eye toward its didactic, its political, its historiographical uses. While scholars have long recognized that early American writers often produced instrumental fictions, these instrumental theories of fictionality specifically have remained overlooked because modern readers often take this association of fictionality with literariness for granted.

MB: I think that’s fascinating because so much of this is a history of taste, right? Someone like Cooper, who was popular in the nineteenth century, became labeled, over the course of the twentieth century, a “bad” author, a “bad” writer of fiction.

TK: Yeah, absolutely. Cooper’s such a useful flashpoint for me! Because even within his career, the terms on which he’s justifying historical fiction changed so radically. In the 1820s, he justified historical fiction as a mode of speculative history and argued for its historiographical value. By the 1850s, he primarily celebrated historical fiction for its “poetical” associations and appeals to taste and aesthetics. And I think this rhetorical shift in his prefaces crystallizes a significant shift in how American writers and reviewers discussed fiction and its purpose in the 1820s versus the 1850s.

CT: Now that we can see that, as students of early American literature, we need to change the way we read and understand fiction during this period, can you describe some of the ways you hope other scholars will take up what you explore in this book?

TK: When one publishes a scholarly book, one kind of sends it out into the void, and I’ve certainly been delighted with the feedback I’ve gotten. My hope is that the book encourages others to attend to this strange archive of texts and these questions about fictionality and fictional truth. These questions are so central to early American fiction—early fictionists were obsessed with them—but they are questions that have been comparatively marginal in recent scholarship. I think this is perhaps because scholars have seen these questions as distant from the sociopolitical concerns that have been a central focus of Americanist literary studies over the past few decades. My hope is that Founded in Fiction shows that these questions of fictionality have stakes for understanding some of the most persistent concerns of Americanist literary study—questions about political education, the gendered imperatives of social life, histories of enchantment and disenchantment, and the racialization of inner life.

One of the things I’m trying to do in this book is separate fictionality from aesthetics. As part of what has sometimes been called “the aesthetic turn” in early American studies, there has been a lot of wonderful recent scholarship—by Siân Silyn Roberts, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Edward Cahill, Edward Larkin, Cindy Weinstein, Russ Castronovo, Christopher Looby, Christopher Castiglia, Duncan Faherty, and Philipp Schweighauser, among many, many others—that has pushed back on the idea that early American fiction is all bad literature. I think now that the idea that these texts have no literary value has been thoroughly debunked, it allows us to return with new eyes to the interesting and sophisticated instrumental justifications for fiction in the early Republic—the extra-literary conceptions of fiction’s value. Many early American writers were doing really interesting things with fiction that were not “literary” in the way that modern readers tend to use that term.

The last thing I would add with regard to how attending to the extra-novelistic nature of these fictions can change how we read them is that this is a claim these fictions often make themselves. When early American authors insisted that their fictions weren’t novels, they frequently did so to appeal to a different readerly practice than those usually associated with novel-reading. In attending to how these claims of generic distinction seek to elicit different reading practices, I followed the lead of the fictions themselves. I hope other scholars will similarly be interested in the dynamics of generic address and reading practice, which I find endlessly fascinating.

MB: Following from this idea of inviting other scholars to think about these topics in different ways, I was struck in your fifth and seventh chapters by how the two ideas you discuss, both hoaxing and the interiority of enslaved people, seem slightly tangential to your argument. How were you using these chapters? To what extent was introducing these topics a way of anticipating possible counterclaims or preparing you for future research projects? How did you imagine these two chapters functioning in the scope of the book?

TK: That’s a really sharp and incisive question. The answer is different in each case. I think this goes back to my answer to Colby’s question a moment ago. One of the things I wanted to do in this book was to show how all these narratologically inflected questions about fiction have been largely, though not completely, ignored, given the historicist focus of American literary studies. I wanted to show how these seemingly abstruse concerns from narrative theory bear on the very sociopolitical questions with which historicist criticism has wrestled and that these are not things that are separate but, in fact, fundamentally inform each other. The part of Chapter Seven on Jacobs’s Incidents was actually one of the earliest parts of the project—I knew I wanted to end up there in order to show how these debates about fiction-reading and these historically-specific understandings of fictionality could inform how even some nonfictional texts sought to appeal to readers. I thought this would crystallize, in an especially dramatic way, fictionality’s centrality to the antebellum literary field. For good ethical and political reasons, there’s been so much scholarly focus on establishing the nonfictional nature of slave narratives, especially given the specific reception history of Incidents. And yet, Jacobs is self-consciously setting up that book in parallel to fictional texts, and recognizing this is, in my view, crucial for understanding the terms on which Jacobs seeks to engage readers. More than simply drawing on the conventions of the sentimental novel, Jacobs displays a sophisticated understanding of how readers relate to fictional characters as opposed to real people. She stages her book’s distinction from fiction to elicit a particular mode of qualified sympathetic engagement. The Douglass part of the chapter, on the other hand, was what I thought was going to be the start of a new project—a project that I’m working on now. This will be a book about what I see as American writers’ deep ambivalence about transparent, omniscient third-person narration—both free indirect discourse and psycho-narration—and the alternative forms they developed for representing thought in fiction. I thought the soliloquies in The Heroic Slave were going to serve as a starting point for that project. I wrote an article about it, and in doing so, I realized that Douglass was actually engaging a lot of the questions about fictionality that were fundamental to Founded in Fiction, so I ended up incorporating my reading of The Heroic Slave into that book.

As far as the hoaxing chapter, that one is the farthest afield, in some ways, from the literary-historical argument of the book. But I felt it was essential because it’s so fundamental to the book’s metacritical argument. This is one of the most dramatic examples of how the retrospective characterization of a narrative as a self-evidently fictional novel, such as in the case of Arthur Gordon Pym, transforms how it would have addressed readers in the 1830s. Contemporary reviewers largely approached Pym within the truth-lie binary that fictionality suspends—they treated it as an instance of the humbug or artful deception that was so prominent in Jacksonian America. Other scholars have noted that Poe’s fictions are sometimes hoaxical, but I wanted to include it because it is a prominent, dramatic example of the limitations of novel history as a catch-all paradigm for understanding the history of early American fiction. I think you’re right to recognize it as somewhat extraneous, but I saw it as fundamental to the metacritical argument about not retrospectively categorizing things as either novelistic or self-evidently fictional, or rather, what this causes us to miss about how they were addressing readers in their own historical moment.

CT: This is our final question for the interview. What would you tell your recently graduated self to expect with the process of getting the dissertation published? Do you have any suggestions about how to prepare early for that in the process of writing the dissertation and then thinking about writing a book proposal, submitting it, and eventually getting it published?

TK: My first important caveat is that I hesitate to advise in this arena because of the vagaries of the job market. A book’s route to publication is going to be shaped by its author’s labor conditions. And this means that the utter lack of a job market at the current moment fundamentally determines how most scholars have to approach the dissertation-to-book process. The advice I would give to my past self—who had the incredible good fortune of landing a tenure track job—would be different than the advice I would give to someone who wasn’t in a tenure track job because there is the pressure of trying to turn the book around as quickly as possible in order to increase your chances on the job market. If I had to give advice to my past self, it would have been to recognize that this is going to be a completely different document. I probably didn’t have an adequate sense of how completely the dissertation would have to change to become a book. I would encourage my past self to recognize what a substantial undertaking this is and not to think that this is going to be something that can be done quickly. But again, this stance is itself a luxury. The flip side of that is, of course, that many people are trying to turn the book around as quickly as possible because it now becomes the precondition for, rather than something one does after one gets, a tenure-track job. So, that shapes fundamentally the different kinds of advice I would give. I guess if one were in that latter situation, it would just be to think about these questions about audience at an earlier stage than I did. I was writing the dissertation, just trying to get down all the evidence I could to make the argument I wanted, not thinking about whether anyone would ever want to read the amount of evidence it provided. 

So I guess there are two competing instincts that I have as I’m trying to formulate any advice: one would be to say, don’t belabor the end of the dissertation because it will change so much. The second is that, given the realities of the job market, maybe it makes sense to try to make it as polished and book-like as possible in graduate school? I have no idea. I think it’s impossible to give general advice about this because of the structural differences between where people end up after the PhD. I realize that’s incredibly unhelpful, but I think giving the sense that one could offer clear advice that would apply to all different situations would be dishonest in the current context.

CT: I really appreciate that because there is so much advice in academic settings where I’ve heard people say, “Do this; it’s the one way to do things. It worked for me.” I really appreciate that nuance and that added caution in attending to the different scenarios. Maybe some of these things will work; maybe not. From what I can tell, at least just being on academic Twitter, watching academic university press editors, and the huge variety of approaches to publishing and their expectations. Some editors are very clear about what they’re looking for, while others might not be.

TK: Yeah, that seems very accurate to me. There are definitely big advantages to researching each press in order to tailor your pitch to them. As I said, I didn’t shape my book manuscript to fit particular presses, but I did think about fit when pitching it to different presses, and I tried to shape my proposal accordingly. It is important to think about your project in terms that could appeal to a wide variety of presses, even as you tailor proposals to specific presses. You don’t want all your hopes riding on a single press, no matter how perfect a fit it might seem for your project. But again, I’m really hesitant to offer even such banal advice on this subject, as every scholar’s route to publication and strategies for approaching this process will be so different depending on their labor conditions.