Realism, Cultural Politics, and Language as Mediation in Mark Twain and Others

Prospects ◽

10.1017/s0361233300003744 ◽

1983 ◽

Vol 8 ◽

pp. 183-195

Author(s):

Jules Chametzky

Keyword(s):

Cultural Politics ◽

Henry James ◽

Mark Twain ◽

William Dean Howells ◽

Life Itself

American classical realists in the period 1865–1900 sought, in one way or another, to grasp the essence of their new concern and method. William Dean Howells defined it as “nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.” Mark Twain claimed in the preface to his first book, “I am sure I have written honestly, whether wisely or not,” whereas Henry James (in The Art of Fiction, 1884) enjoined the aspiring writer not to “think too much about optimism and pessimism; try and catch the color of life itself.” Truth, honesty, faithfulness to the “color of life itself”—what serious writer, in any period and writing in any mode, is not committed to those things? The problem, of course, lies in what we mean by each term, where the “material” and the “color of life” are, and by what standards (and by whom) they are to be validated. The resolution of those questions is a version of cultural politics.

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Pain and the Aesthetics of US Literary Realism

10.1093/oso/9780198858737.001.0001 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Cynthia J. Davis

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Henry James ◽

Mark Twain ◽

William Dean Howells ◽

Literary Realism ◽

Physical Pain ◽

Civilizing Process ◽

Physical Suffering ◽

Convergence And Divergence ◽

Similarities And Differences

This book examines the cultural pursuit of a painless ideal as a neglected context for US literary realism. Advances in anesthesia in the final decades of the nineteenth century together with influential religious ideologies helped strengthen the equation of a comfortable existence insulated from physical suffering with the height of civilization. Theories of the civilizing process as intensifying sensitivity to suffering were often adduced to justify a revulsion from physical pain among the postbellum elite. Yet a sizeable portion of this elite rejected this comfort-seeking, pain-avoiding aesthetic as a regrettable consequence of over-civilization. Proponents of the strenuous cult instead identified pain and strife as essential ingredients of an invigorated life. The Ache of the Actual examines variants on a lesser known counter-sensibility integral to the writings of a number of influential literary realists. William Dean Howells, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, and Charles Chesnutt each delineated alternative definitions of a superior sensibility indebted to suffering rather than to either revulsion from or immersion in it. They resolved the binary contrast between pain-aversion on one side and pain-immersion on the other by endorsing an uncommon responsiveness to pain whose precise form depended on the ethical and aesthetic priorities of the writer in question. Focusing on these variations elucidates the similarities and differences within US literary realism while revealing areas of convergence and divergence between realism and other long-nineteenth-century literary modes, chief among them both sentimentalism and naturalism, that were similarly preoccupied with pain.

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Introduction

10.1093/oso/9780198808787.003.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Elizabeth Renker

Keyword(s):

Henry James ◽

Mark Twain ◽

Literary Culture ◽

William Dean Howells ◽

Literary Realism ◽

Prose Fiction ◽

Literary Movement ◽

The Core ◽

Literary Histories ◽

American Literary Realism

The terms “poetry” and “realism” have a complex and mostly oppositional relationship in American literary histories of the postbellum period. The core narrative holds that “realism,” the major literary “movement” of the era, developed apace in prose fiction, while poetry, stuck in a hopelessly idealist late-romantic mode, languished and stagnated. Poetry is thus almost entirely absent from scholarship on American literary realism except as the emblem of realism’s opposite: a desiccated genteel “twilight of the poets.” The typical tale held that, while poetry sputtered into decline, William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Mark Twain towered over literary culture as “major realists,” with 1885 standing as the ...

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The Sin of Art and the Problem of American Realism: William Dean Howells

Prospects ◽

10.1017/s0361233300003896 ◽

1984 ◽

Vol 9 ◽

pp. 115-142 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Michael Davitt Bell

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

American Literature ◽

Henry James ◽

Mark Twain ◽

William Dean Howells ◽

Men And Women ◽

Historical Importance ◽

Fiction Writers ◽

American Romanticism

Warner berthoff begins The Ferment of Realism (1965), his study of American literature from 1884 to 1919, with a succinct restatement of an idea long accepted by literary critics: “The great collective event in American letters during the 1880s and 1890s was the securing of ‘realism’ as the dominant standard of value.” This is the customary interpretation of the American literary generation that included William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and Henry James; indeed, these men viewed their own historical importance in much the same terms. Thus James, in his 1879 book on Hawthorne, condescended toward the “absence in Hawthorne of that quality of realism which is now so much in fashion.” Twain's novels are laced with attacks, launched supposedly in the name of “realism,” against “romance” and the “romantic,” which is also the serious point behind the humor of such essays as “Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses.” And Howells, in the 1880s, emerged as the most overt American spokesman for the new standard of “realism.” “Let fiction cease to lie about life,” he demanded in Criticism and Fiction (1891); “let it portray men and women as they are, actuated by the motives and the passions in the measure we all know; let it leave off painting dolls and working them by springs and wires.” Twentieth-century literary historians have for the most part been content to accept and perpetuate these claims; they have told us again and again that in the works of our best fiction writers after the Civil War, American “romanticism” gave way to American “realism.”

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The Galaxy, National Literature, and Reconstruction

Nineteenth-Century Literature ◽

10.1525/ncl.2020.75.1.50 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 75 (1) ◽

pp. 50-81

Author(s):

Brook Thomas

Keyword(s):

Henry James ◽

Mark Twain ◽

National Literature ◽

Lost Cause ◽

American Democracy ◽

Fair Treatment ◽

The Galaxy ◽

Great Poet ◽

John William De Forest ◽

United Nation

Brook Thomas, “The Galaxy, National Literature, and Reconstruction” (pp. 50–81) The North’s victory in the Civil War preserved the Union and led to the abolition of slavery. Reconstruction was a contentious debate about what sort of nation that union of states should become. Published during Reconstruction before being taken over by the Atlantic Monthly, the Galaxy tried, in Rebecca Harding Davis’s words, to be “a national magazine in which the current of thought of every section could find expression.” The Galaxy published literature and criticism as well as political, sociological, and economic essays. Its editors were moderates who aesthetically promoted a national literature and politically promoted reconciliation between Northern and Southern whites along with fair treatment for freedmen. What fair treatment entailed was debated in its pages. Essayists included Horace Greeley, the abolitionist journalist; Edward A. Pollard, author of The Lost Cause (1866); and David Croly, who pejoratively coined the phrase “miscegenation.” Literary contributors included Davis, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Mark Twain, Constance Fenimore Woolson, John William De Forest, Julian Hawthorne, Emma Lazarus, Paul Hayne, Sidney Lanier, and Joaquin Miller. Juxtaposing some of the Galaxy’s literary works with its debates over how the Union should be reimagined points to the neglected role that Reconstruction politics played in the institutionalization of American literary studies. Whitman is especially important. Reading the great poet of American democracy in the context of the Galaxy reveals how his postbellum celebration of a united nation—North, South, East, and West—aligns him with moderate views on Reconstruction that today seem racially reactionary.

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