earticle

영어

Critics of early American novels have argued that the rise of the American novel was deeply rooted in the idea of building the American Republic in its nascent phase. In recent critical discourse, however, this thesis has been counterattacked by other critics who emphasize that migration and interaction across the Atlantic were a palpable fact in early American world. In fact, transatlantic studies leads us to reconsider the naming of William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy (1789) as the first American novel. On the basis of transatlanticism, this paper attempts to open a possibility of embracing many works before Brown's The Power of Sympathy as part of the American novel. Following this argument, this paper explores Unca Eliza Winkfield's The Female American (1767) as one of the American novels. As one of Robinsonades, the novel presents an anti-domestic adventure story rendered in the transatlantic and American context. The central character is a woman who is biracial, multilingual, and boasts a transnational heritage. By projecting an ideal vision of a racially-intermixed female's active participation in building a new nation, the novel turns out to be a kind of American national fantasy. Given these factors, the novel may be safely called as the American novel. However, the point of a transatlantic perspective is not only to recover similar novels as the American novel, but also to raise an awareness of rethinking the boundary of the American novel.