A Companion to American Fiction, 1865 - 1914

by Lamb, Robert Paul; Thompson, G. R.

• ISBN13: 9781405100649
• ISBN10: 1405100648
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-12-09
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

A Companion to American Fiction, 1865-1914 is a groundbreaking collection of essays written by leading critics for a wide audience of students, scholars, and interested general readers. Containing 29 essays and 12 illustrations with accompanying texts, this comprehensive volume is divided into three sections covering historical traditions and genres, contexts and themes, and major authors. The essays address a mixture of canonical and non-canonical subjects; so, alongside treatment of such standard topics as realism, naturalism, and regionalism are contributions on the romance, sentimentalism, early modernism, African American and Native American narratives, women's fiction, class, ethnicity, and the short story. A significant feature of the book is its inclusion of chapters on both frontier and urban narratives, Civil War literature, Darwin's influence on fiction, children's literature, consumer culture, law and narrative, utopian fiction, and ecological literature and ecocriticism. Contributors present lucid syntheses of the best criticism available on their topics and, at the same time, offer original perspectives of their own. The Companion is a book that no one interested in nineteenth-century fiction or American literature can do without.

Author Biography

Robert Paul Lamb is Associate Professor of English at Purdue University. The author of many articles on American literature and recipient of Harvard University’s Bowdoin Prize for scholarship, his teaching honors include Harvard’s Stephen J. Botein Prize, Purdue’s University Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching, Purdue’s Liberal Arts Departmental Award for Educational Excellence, and induction into The Purdue Book of Great Teachers.

G.R. Thompson is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Purdue University. His previous publications include the Norton Critical Edition of Edgar Allan Poe (2004), Neutral Ground: New Traditionalism and the American Romance Controversy (1999), The Art of Authorial Presence: Hawthorne’s Provincial Tales (1993), Essays and Reviews ofEdgar Allan Poe (1984), Ruined Eden of the Present: Hawthorne, Melville and Poe (1981) and Poe’s Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (1973).

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	x
Notes on Contributors	xi
Acknowledgments	xvii
Editors' Introduction	1	(12)
Robert Paul Lamb and G.R. Thompson
PART I Historical Traditions and Genres	13	(162)
1 The Practice and Promotion of American Literary Realism	15	(20)
Nancy Glazener
2 Excitement and Consciousness in the Romance Tradition	35	(18)
William J. Scheick
3 The Sentimental and Domestic Traditions, 1865-1900	53	(24)
Gregg Camfield
4 Morality, Modernity, and "Malarial Restlessness": American Realism in its Anglo-European Contexts	77	(19)
Winfried Fluck
5 American Literary Naturalism	96	(23)
Christophe Den Tandt
6 American Regionalism: Local Color, National Literature, Global Circuits	119	(21)
June Howard
7 Women Authors and the Roots of American Modernism	140	(9)
Linda Wagner-Martin
8 The Short Story and the Short-Story Sequence, 1865-1914	149	(28)
J. Gerald Kennedy
PART II Contexts and Themes	175	(274)
9 Ecological Narrative and Nature Writing	177	(24)
S.K. Robisch
10 "The Frontier Story": The Violence of Literary History	201	(21)
Christine Bold
11 Native American Narratives: Resistance and Survivance	222	(18)
Gerald Vizenor
12 Representing the Civil War and Reconstruction: From Uncle Tom to Uncle Remus	240	(20)
Kathleen Diffley
13 Engendering the Canon: Women's Narratives, 1865-1914	260	(19)
Grace Farrell
14 Confronting the Crisis: African American Narratives	279	(17)
Dickson D. Bruce, Jr.
15 Fiction's Many Cities	296	(22)
Sidney H. Bremer
16 Mapping the Culture of Abundance: Literary Narratives and Consumer Culture	318	(22)
Sarah Way Sherman
17 Secrets of the Master's Deed Box: Narrative and Class	340	(16)
Christopher P. Wilson
18 Ethnic Realism	356	(21)
Robert M. Dowling
19 Darwin, Science, and Narrative	377	(18)
Bert Bender
20 Writing in the "Vulgar Tongue": Law and American Narrative	395	(16)
William E. Moddelmog
21 Planning Utopia	411	(17)
Thomas Peyser
22 American Children's Narrative as Social Criticism, 1865-1914	428	(21)
Gwen Athene Tarbox
PART III Major Authors	449	(138)
23 An Idea of Order at Concord: Soul and Society in the Mind of Louisa May Alcott	451	(17)
John Matteson
24 America Can Break Your Heart: On the Significance of Mark Twain	468	(31)
Robert Paul Lamb
25 William Dean Howells and the Bourgeois Quotidian: Affection, Skepticism, Disillusion	499	(19)
Michael Anesko
26 Henry James in a New Century	518	(18)
John Carlos Rowe
27 Toward a Modernist Aesthetic: The Literary Legacy of Edith Wharton	536	(21)
Candace Waid and Clare Colquitt
28 Sensations of Style: The Literary Realism of Stephen Crane	557	(15)
William E. Cain
29 Theodore Dreiser and the Force of the Personal	572	(15)
Clare Virginia Eby
Index	587