Introduction

The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism offers thirty-five original chapters with fresh interpretations of the artistic and political challenges of representing life accurately. Organized by topic and theme, the chapters draw on recent scholarship in literary and cultural studies to offer an authoritative and in-depth reassessment of major and minor figures and the contexts that shaped their work. One set of chapters explores realism’s genesis and its connection to previous and subsequent movements. Others examine the inclusiveness of representation, the circulation of texts, and the aesthetic representation of science, time, space, and the subjects of medicine, the New Woman, and the middle class. Still others trace the connection to other arts—poetry, drama, illustration, photography, painting, and film—and to pedagogical issues in the teaching of realism.

African American Realism

Critical accounts of American literary realism have often focused on how realism is an intervention in, rather than a simple representation of, reality. Truth, however, remains a powerful referent for realists and a particularly complex one for postbellum African American writers whose works exemplify, but also interrogate, realism as a mode of representation. This chapter argues that linking African American writers such as Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles Chesnutt to the realism of William Dean Howells reveals how for these writers, realism itself becomes a way to interrogate the power of stories to define what is true and to intervene in such assumptions. At the same time, these authors’ works increasingly show the limits of such interventions in relation to the intractability of racialized and racist discourse—and the racial disparities such discourse reinforces—at the turn of the twentieth century.

The Feminine Origins of American Literary Realism

This chapter describes American literary realism as emerging from the efforts of a group of early postbellum women writers—Elizabeth Stoddard, Rebecca Harding Davis, Louisa May Alcott, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps—to access the newly minted American high literary culture exemplified by the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne. The origins of realism, these writers’ texts show, lie in intertextuality. They not only revise their own and one another’s work to excise the vestiges of the popular feminine tradition of domestic sentimentalism, but they also rework Hawthorne’s canonical gothic plots and imagery in the context of a shift in literary tastes away from the romance and toward an aesthetic that values the contemporary and the everyday. Their adaptation of the Hawthornean gothic to address the patriarchal and capitalist foundations of social life yields the earliest version of American literary realism as a mode of structural social critique.

Realism’s American Readers, 1860–1914

This chapter demonstrates that the readership for American literary realism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was much more heterogeneous and extensive than previously believed. Works of realism were not read only in high-priced magazines and books by genteel audiences living in urban areas, but they were also available in a wide variety of lower-priced books and periodicals—including newspapers—that reached people from various socioeconomic classes in small towns and rural areas as well as in cities. This chapter also provides an analysis of the limitations of previous research on readers’ reception of realist fiction, as well as a detailed explanation of the new approaches that literary scholars need to adopt in order to understand the cultural labor that realist texts performed among its various audiences.

The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism

The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism offers thirty-five original chapters with fresh interpretations of the artistic and political challenges of representing life accurately. Organized by topic and theme, the chapters draw on recent scholarship in literary and cultural studies to offer an authoritative and in-depth reassessment of major and minor figures and the contexts that shaped their work. One set of chapters explores realism’s genesis and its connection to previous and subsequent movements. Others examine the inclusiveness of representation, the circulation of texts, and the aesthetic representation of science, time, space, and the subjects of medicine, the New Woman, and the middle class. Still others trace the connection to other arts—poetry, drama, illustration, photography, painting, and film—and to pedagogical issues in the teaching of realism.

Realism and the Profession of Authorship

This chapter examines tensions between authorship and publishing in the era of American literary realism. The publishing industry changed with the emergence of literary agents, the growing financial significance of magazines and syndication, and the increasingly influential role of publishing-house editors. All were signs of a centralizing and marketizing publishing system flexible enough to withstand changes in dominant literary genres, tastes, and fashions. With examples from the careers of well- and lesser-known realists—William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Charles Chesnutt—authorship remained stubbornly immune to professionalization, in part because writing is better considered as a craft than as a profession and in part because the practices creating authorship’s marketization did not require its professionalization.

Introduction

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 ...