Since the popular literature of the Early Republic, and especially the early American novel, is a crucial source for my work on the idea of home, I can’t avoid the scholarship of Cathy N. Davidson.  Nor do I want to.  Davidson’s work on the novel as a democratic genre, her explorations of how novels were read, and by whom, and to what purpose and effect — all of her painstaking research, rendered into brilliant prose, has cut a path through the wilderness, along which I will gladly and gratefully walk for as far as it will take me in pursuit Read more