What role did short fiction play in crafting stories of US nationhood? This lively question drives Lydia G. Fash's analysis of the sketch, the tale, and what she calls the beginnings of American literature. Fash's term “the culture of beginnings” describes the rewriting of puritan histories, revolutionary narratives, and other national origin stories for a white US reading public in the decades after the War of 1812. Fash argues that short fiction was an essential tool for fashioning US national identity, and her work demonstrates short fiction's influence on the mid-nineteenth century American novel.
The term “short story” was not widely used until the late nineteenth century (6). Before then, short fiction circulated in a variety of interrelated genres, including the sketch and the tale. The tale, Fash shows, “evoke[s] temporal distance (a ‘once upon a time’),” focuses on plot, and is characteristically ambiguous (21). By contrast, the sketch “seeks...