U.S. historians have long considered the Civil War and its Reconstruction as a second American revolution. Literary scholars, however, have yet to show how fully these years revolutionized the American imagination. One marker of this was the postwar search for a “Great American Novel”—a novel fully adequate to the breadth and diversity of the United States in the era of the Fourteenth Amendment. The debate over what full representation would mean led to a thoroughgoing reconstruction of the meaning of “literature” for readers, writers, politics, and law. Legal Realisms examines the transformation of the idea of “realism” in literature and beyond in the face of uneven developments in the racial, ethnic, gender, and class structure of American society. The ideal of equality before the law conflicted with persistent inequality, and it was called into question by changing ideas about accurate representation and the value of cultural difference within the visual arts, philosophy, law, and political and moral theory. Offering provocative new readings of Mark Twain, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Helen Hunt Jackson, Albion Tourgée, and others, Legal Realisms follows the novel through the worlds of California Native American removal and the Reconstruction-era South, of the Mississippi valley and the urban Northeast. It shows how incomplete emancipation haunted the celebratory pursuit of a literature of national equality and explores the way novelists’ representation of the difficulty of achieving equality before the law helped Americans articulate the need for a more robust concept of society.
