📖 The Problem of American Realism

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The Problem of American Realism
By:Michael Davitt Bell
Published on 1996-01-01 by University of Chicago Press

Ever since William Dean Howells declared his |realism war| in the 1880s, literary historians have regarded the rise of |realism| and |naturalism| as the great development in American post-Civil War fiction. Yet there are many problems with this generalization. It is virtually impossible, for example, to extract from the novels and manifestoes of American writers of this period any consistent definitions of realism or naturalism as modes of literary representation. Rather than seek common traits in widely divergent |realist| and |naturalist| literary works, Michael Davitt Bell focuses here on the role that these terms played in the social and literary discourse of the 1880s and 1890s. Bell argues that in America, |realism| and |naturalism| never achieved the sort of theoretical rigor that they did in European literary debate. Instead, the function of these ideas in America was less aesthetic than ideological, promoting as |reality| a version of social normalcy based on radically anti-|literary| and heavily gendered assumptions.