The Problem of American Realism Studies in the Cultural History of a Literary Id

The University of Chicago Press

The Problem of American RealismStudies in the Cultural History of a Literary Idea\nAuthor(s): Michael Davitt Bell\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: The University of Chicago Press, United States\nImprint: University of Chicago Press\nISBN-13: 9780226042015, 978-0226042015\nSynopsis\nEver since William Dean Howells declared his \""realism war\"" in the 1880s, literary historians have regarded the rise of realism and naturalism 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, Bell examines the effects that ide.