{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.018531228551818806, 'fraction_numerical': 0.015099519560741249, 'mean_word_length': 5.024793388429752, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
The Problem of Population and the Form of the American Novel

Novels do not respect national boundaries but spread from many points across borders to form something less like a tree and more like a network connecting dispersed points of exchange. In mounting this argument in his The Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900 (1998), Franco Moretti calls attention to the relationship between the map within the text (its fictional geography) and the map of its distribution. Moretti observes in passing that exchanges within gothic fiction cover a much wider geographical territory than the exchanges that produce social relationships in the domestic fiction of someone like Jane Austen. But when we try to use a similar historiographical model to formulate a history of the American novel, we encounter few examples before the fiction of James Fenimore Cooper that respect our national geography. Indeed, we have to wait for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s House of Seven Gables (1851–52) or Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) to find American fiction that seems to strive for a coherent, auto-generative account of the national community. On the other hand, when we look for novels that map the New World in a manner resembling the European gothic novel—a form that transports bodies and information across regional and national borders—there are plenty of examples to be found. What follows is an argument to the effect that the early American novel was