SOURCE: "The Other American Renaissance," in The American Renaissance Reconsidered: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1982-83, edited by Walter Benn Michaels and Donald E. Pease, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985, pp. 34-57.

In this essay, Tompkins defends the domestic novel against the common criticism that it portrays a narrow, trivial, and overly idealistic world. Only the footnoted material pertaining to the essay below has been reprinted in the "Notes" section.

The word other in my title refers to the fiction written during the period we know as the American Renaissance by writers whose names we do not know. The writer I am concerned with in particular is Susan Warner, who was born in the same year as Herman Melville and whose best-selling novel, The Wide, Wide World, was published in the same year as Moby Dick. But I am interested in Warner's I novel not for the light...