Nineteenth-century American romance, as a genre, is defined by the writings of a particular group of authors - James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Henry James - all of whom are associated with one another in time and place. In this volume, Emily Miller Budick examines the genre both as a style and within a historical context.

She interprets American romance as an evolving literary aesthetic and cultural philosophy - as an effort by a group of writers to produce what Noah Webster called an "American tongue," a language imbued with the values of democracy and pluralism.