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Introduction: A Tale Of Our Own Times, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Catharine Sedgwick and the American Novel of Manners

In his preface to his novel of manners Home as Found (1838), James Fenimore Cooper repeats what were already commonplaces about American society as the subject matter for fiction. Lamenting "that no attempt to delineate ordinary American life, either on the stage or in the pages of a novel, has been rewarded with successful he admits Home as Found is another such attempt but professes he has "scarcely a hope of success. It would be indeed a desperate undertaking, to think of making anything interesting in the way of a Roman de …