The problem of American realism: studies in the cultural history of a literary idea

Abstract

Ever since William Dean Howells declared his war in the 1880s, literary historians have regarded the rise of and as the signal development in post-Civil War American fiction. Questioning this generalization, Michael Davitt Bell investigates the role that these terms played in the social and literary discourse of the 1880s and 1890s. He argues that realism and naturalism were ideological categories used to promote a version of reality based on radically anti-literary and heavily gendered assumptions. In chapters on William Dean Howells, Frank Norris, Mark Twain, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser and Sarah Orne Jewett, the author examines the effects that ideas about and had on writers. He demonstrates that, for many of them, claiming to be a realist or a naturalist was a way to provide assurance that one was a real man rather than an effeminate artist.

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