Clarence

Broadview’s is the only edition available of this pioneering American novel of manners.

“This new edition of Clarence continues the important resurrection of Sedgwick’s writing for the use of both scholarship and teaching. The editors and press have done an excellent job of constructing a user-friendly edition of this important novel, while also including appended materials that richly contextualize it in antebellum literary history and transatlantic literary and cultural relations. The edition will undoubtedly get a lot of good use in the future.” — Philip Gould, Brown University

“Homestead and Foster prove that this intensely urban novel deserves a central place in the American literary canon. Both the novel itself and the scholarly apparatus they supply show that Americans were producing fine novels of manners as early as 1830. An excellent edition of a fascinating novel, richly contextualized and historicized.” — Susan K. Harris, University of Kansas

Honorable mention recipient for the 2012 Society for the Study of American Women Writers Award.

A pioneering American novel of manners first published in 1830, Catharine Sedgwick’s Clarence follows heiress Gertrude Clarence as she negotiates the perils of the marriage market in New York City. Giving Gertrude’s family English and Caribbean histories, Sedgwick aligns the United States in the 1820s with a larger Atlantic world. This edition of Sedgwick’s cosmopolitan novel will contribute to a rethinking both of the history of the American novel of manners and to the shape of Sedgwick’s career as one of the most important novelists of the first half of the nineteenth century.

This Broadview edition offers a rich selection of contextual materials, including selections from Sedgwick’s correspondence and journals reconstructing the origins of the novel, engravings and lithographs of key sites in the novel, American and British reviews of the novel, and documentation of the author’s revised edition of 1849.

• | Author: Catharine Maria Sedgwick
• | Publisher: Broadview Press Ltd
• | Publication Date: Oct 20, 2011
• | Number of Pages:
• | Language:
• | Binding: Paperback / softback
• | ISBN-13: 9781551118611
• | ISBN-10: 1551118610