French Literature Reviews - 2026

A. Claybaugh, The Novel of Purpose. Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World
Novel and Narrative Prose

CLAYBAUGH, Amanda, The Novel of Purpose. Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World, Cornell University Press, 2006, 264 pp.

ISBN: 978-0-8014-4480-7

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 transatlantic 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 Brontë, 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. Amanda Claybaugh offers readings that connect reformist agitation to the formal features of literary works and argues for a method of transatlantic study that attends not only to nations, but also to the many groups that collaborate across national boundaries.

Amanda Claybaugh is Assistant Professor of English at Columbia University.

Focusing on the interconnected literary marketplace of Great Britain and the United States, this study examines how transatlantic reform movements such as antislavery, temperance, and suffrage influenced nineteenth-century fiction. Amanda Claybaugh demonstrates that writers did not merely represent social issues; they adopted the rhetorical strategies of activists to actively engage readers. This dynamic fostered a distinctively Anglo-American realism that linked literature and political agitation. The book offers close readings of major authors including Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Mark Twain, illustrating how reform permeated the period's literary imagination even among skeptics.

This work serves as a valuable resource for scholars and students of nineteenth-century literature, cultural history, and transatlantic studies. By connecting reformist rhetoric to the formal techniques of the novel, Claybaugh provides a methodological framework for examining how texts cross national boundaries. It addresses central questions about the relationship between art and social change, showing how literature participated in the debates that defined the modern Anglo-American world. The study will particularly interest readers exploring the intersections of narrative form, ideology, and nineteenth-century social reform.