The Cambridge Introduction to American Literary Realism

by Phillip J. Barrish

• ISBN13: 9780521050104
• ISBN10: 0521050103
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-11-28
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Between the Civil War and the First World War, realism was the most prominent form of American fiction. Realist writers of the period include some of America's greatest, such as Henry James, Edith Wharton and Mark Twain, but also many lesser-known writers whose work still speaks to us today, for instance Charles Chesnutt, Zitkala- a and Sarah Orne Jewett. Emphasizing realism's historical context, this introduction traces the genre's relationship with powerful, often violent, social conflicts involving race, gender, class and national origin. It also examines how the realist style was created; the necessarily ambiguous relationship between realism produced on the page and reality outside the book; and the different, often contradictory, forms 'realism' took in literary works by different authors. The most accessible yet sophisticated account of American literary realism currently available, this volume will be of great value to students, teachers and readers of the American novel.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	p. xi
Acknowledgments	p. xii
Introduction: American literary realism	p. 1
Literary precursors, literary contexts	p. 8
Authorship in nineteenth-century America	p. 9
Hawthorne, art, and literary romance	p. 10
Sentimental fiction	p. 13
Manliness and the realist critique of romance	p. 15
Realisms debts to romance	p. 19
American and European realisms	p. 23
The "look of agony" and everyday middle-class life: three transitional works	p. 26
Writing the factory: "Life in the Iron Mills"	p. 27
Writing the Civil War: Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty	p. 32
Writing the ordinary: Their Wedding Journey	p. 35
Creating the "odour" of the real: techniques of realism	p. 41
The "air of reality"	p. 42
Solidity of specification	p. 43
Realist stories, realist discourse	p. 46
Direct quotation: letting characters speak for themselves	p. 49
Omniscient vs. point-of-view narration	p. 50
Free-indirect discourse	p. 53
Narrator as imperfect historian	p. 55
Conflicting manners: high realism and social competition	p. 58
Manners and cultural prestige	p. 60
How to display wealth	p. 65
Money, gender, and taste in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth	p. 67
"Superior distinction"	p. 69
Ethnography and realism	p. 73
"Democracy in literature"? Literary regionalism	p. 74
Regionalism, dialect, and the "folk"	p. 76
Locals and cosmopolitans in a changing nation	p. 78
Regionalism's implied reader	p. 80
Searching for the picturesque	p. 84
Critical controversy: Sarah Orne Jewett and women's regionalism	p. 87
"The blab of the pave": realism and the city	p. 95
The "other" half	p. 97
Howells's Hazard	p. 100
Urban poverty, middle-class rationalization, and self-criticism	p. 103
People of the streets: Maggie's slums	p. 106
Crisis of agency: literary naturalism, economic change, and "masculinity"	p. 114
Naturalism and determinism	p. 116
Naturalism's historical and intellectual contexts	p. 118
Naturalism and consumer culture: the case of Dreiser's Sister Carrie	p. 121
Naturalism and masculinity	p. 124
The sissy and the wolf	p. 128
"Certain facts of life": realism and feminism	p. 134
Realism and the New Woman	p. 136
Feminist realisms: the "facts" of female lives	p. 137
Gothic realities: "The Yellow Wallpaper"	p. 138
Corporeal realities: The Awakening	p. 142
Whiteness and The Awakening	p. 146
A different reality: Contending Forces	p. 148
"The unjust spirit of caste": realism and race	p. 154
The post-Reconstruction South	p. 155
Chesnutt's revision of plantation fiction	p. 157
The powers of conjure	p. 160
Twain, Huck, and realism	p. 163
Huckleberry Finn and the Jim question	p. 166
Challenging Judge Lynch: The Marrow ofTradition	p. 169
New Americans write realism	p. 173
Abraham Cahan: immigrant realism	p. 176
Sui Sin Far: combating exclusion and exoticization	p. 180
Zitkala-èa: resisting the "civilizing machine" Americo Paredes: border realism/border modernism	p. 190
Conclusion: realisms after realism	p. 195
Notes	p. 200
Works cited	p. 204
Index	p. 216
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