Amanda Claybaugh is at work on a manuscript entitled The Literary History of Reconstruction. In this project, she identifies a forgotten tradition of Reconstruction writings and shows that this tradition constitutes a sustained argument about the proper scope and function of government--an argument that continues to shape the popular understanding of government into our own day. She is also at work on some shorter trans-Atlantic projects: an essay on "Trollope and America" for The Cambridge Companion to Anthony Trollope; and an essay on the many nineteenth-century US authors who served abroad as US minister or US consul.
The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World (Cornell University Press, 2007): In the nineteenth century, Great Britain and the United States shared a single literary marketplace that linked the reform movements, as well as the literatures, of the two nations. The writings of trans-Atlantic reformers--antislavery, temperance, and suffrage activists--gave novelists a new sense of purpose and prompted them to invent new literary forms. The result was a distinctively Anglo-American realism, in which novelists, conceiving of themselves as reformers, sought to act upon their readers--and, through their readers, the world. Indeed, reform became so predominant that many novelists borrowed from reformist writings even though they were skeptical of reform itself. Among them are some of the century's most important authors: Anne Bronte, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Elizabeth Stoddard, and Mark Twain.
The Novel of Purpose proposes a new way of understanding social reform in Great Britain and the United States. It offers readings that connect reformist agitation to the formal features of literary works and argues for a method of trans-Atlantic study that attends not only to nation, but also to the many groups that collaborate across national boundaries.
See reviews in Choice (September 2007), Studies in English Literature (Autumn 2007), and Humanities and Social Sciences Online (2007).
See an ongoing discussion about The Novel of Purpose at The Valve. See an article about this discussion in the minnesota review.
