Found among the Papers: Fictions of Textual Discovery in Early America

Abstract

Though modeled on the insistent factuality that had defined prefatory material in fiction a century earlier (what scholars have called the pseudofactual mode), the narrative frame of the found manuscript utilized in early American novels like Unca Eliza Winkfield's The Female American (1767) and Susanna Rowson's Reuben and Rachel (1798) had long been recognized as a "fiction" in itself. Linking this trope to current debates over the "archive" and the "hermeneutics of suspicion" this essay argues that the endurance of the "found manuscript" convention can be traced to the interpretive methodologies of early American antiquarianism and the growing effort to find "among the papers" of the dead and the living a materially stable canon of American letters. Pointing to emerging archives both literally and figuratively, writers of historical fiction such as Washington Irving, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and John Neal were engaged with an ongoing recovery and reprinting of colonial documents that was coincident with the rise of American historical and antiquarian societies. In dramatizing antiquarian excavation and serendipitous "finds" while also conspicuously citing new histories based on such finds, historical fictions of the early nineteenth century registered the tension between perceiving old "papers" as a body of enduring source material and as a haphazard hoard of mutable ephemera that demanded imaginative reconstruction. Reading historical fictions as an outgrowth of antiquarian research also invites us to reevaluate the legacy of the pseudofactual, and its relationship with emergent discourses of fictionality, by questioning long-standing historicist approaches to early American fiction.