"An authoritative new history of the early American novel from a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Philip F. Gura's Truth's Ragged Edge is perhaps the first comprehensive study of the
early American novel since Richard Chase's 1957 classic, The American Novel and Its Tradition. Gura opens with the first truly homegrown genre of fiction: religious tracts, short parables
intended to instruct the Christian reader. He then turns to the city novels of the 1830s, which depicted with mixed feelings the rapid growth and modernization of American society. He concludes
with fresh interpretations of the introspective novels that appeared before the Civil War, such as those by Hawthorne and by Melville, from whom Gura takes his title. The grand narrative sweep
of the book is balanced by Gura's great insight that the early novel never fully left its origins behind, even as it evolved--it remained a means of theological and philosophical dispute, and
reflected the oldest and deepest divisions in American Christianity, politics, and culture. In addition to discussing novels that are considered classics, Gura recovers many novels--by authors
as diverse as the evangelical writer Susan Warner, the African American novelist Frank J. Webb, and the early feministnovelist Elizabeth Stoddard--that will be revelations to the contemporary
reader. Panoramic and original, Truth's Ragged Edge is an indispensable guide to the origins and development of the American novel and will become a standard book on its subject"--
