Introduction

A colleague asked me, when learning about this new collection of chapters on American literary realism, “Why study realism?” In thinking of a text I had taught that day, William Dean Howells’s “Editha,” I replied, “Because realism can save lives!” In this story, Editha longs for a fiancé who “would have done something to win her; she did not know what, but something.” Like many a romantic before her, Editha longs for the grand gesture to demonstrate love. But George Gearson, a pragmatic and straightforward soul, “had simply asked her for her love, on the way home from a concert, and she gave her love to him, without, as it were, thinking.” Not satisfied, “it flashed upon her, if he could do something worthy to have won her—be a hero, her hero—it would be even better than if he had done it before asking her; it would be grander” (110). So George goes off to battle and is promptly killed—not in a major confrontation that would have satisfied Editha’s longing for a heroic symbol but in “the first skirmish … which was telegraphed as a trifling loss on our side” (222). Howells’s point is clear in this antiwar story that doubles as a primer for the danger of romanticism: romantic ideals are deadly, while realistic attitudes can preserve life.

Mark Twain similarly skewered romantic values in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where Huck falls under the spell of Tom Sawyer’s attempt to imitate the fantasies of romance only to discover, with his pragmatic eye, that they make no practical sense (as when, enamored with the tale of Aladdin and his lamp, he rubs an ordinary lamp to no effect). And in Life on the Mississippi, Twain specifically attacks the attitudes reflected in the romance novels (particularly Ivanhoe) of Walter Scott as being responsible for qualities that have retarded the progress of the Southerner toward modernity:

so you have practical, common-sense, progressive ideas, and progressive works, mixed up with the duel, the inflated speech, and the jejune romanticism of an absurd past that is dead, and out of charity ought to be buried. But for the Sir Walter disease, the character of the Southerner—or Southron, according to Sir Walter’s starchier way of phrasing it—would be wholly modern, in place of modern and mediaeval mixed, and the South would be fully a generation further advanced than it is. (375)

When realism first emerged as a fashionable new form of writing, its major practitioners delighted in “banging the babes of Romance about,” as Howells famously described the target of his critical writing in a letter to English poet and critic Edmund Gosse (January 1, 1886; Howells, Selected Letters 152). And fellow writers did indeed take swipes at the then-dominant romantic genre. In “Productive Conditions of American Literature,” for example, Hamlin Garland proclaimed that the romance “is a lie that lulls the conscience to sleep.” In contrast, “the novel or drama of life stings, arouses, fires with exultant and awakened humanitarian religion. To one the reader goes to dream, to sensuously enjoy; from the other, the reader rises with broader sympathy, with more complete knowledge, better fitted to think and act in the interest of truth and freedom” (154–155).

In what scholars later called the Realism Wars,¹ the nation’s magazinists fired off salvo after salvo arguing for the form of art that best reflected the nation’s aspirations. In an 1883 essay for the Atlantic Monthly, Charles Dudley Warner early identified its key questions: what is art and, just as important, what is its purpose? For Warner, “Art requires an idealization of nature.” While recognizing that all art requires representation, for Warner, “art is selection and idealization, with a view to impressing the mind with human, or even higher than human, sentiments and ideas” (33–34). The problem with realism, Warner argues, is that “it disregards the higher laws of art, and attempts to give us unidealized pictures of life” (35), referring to realistic writers’ penchant for depicting the common and the ordinary. Instead, the best art “lifts the imagination and quickens the spirit to lighten the burdens of life by taking us for a time out of our humdrum and perhaps sordid conditions, so that we can see familiar life somewhat idealized” (39). For Hamilton Wright Mabie, true art “is based on the conception that life is at bottom a revelation; that human growth under all conditions has a spiritual law back of it; that human relations of all kinds have spiritual types behind them; and that the discovery of these universal facts, and the clear, noble embodiment of them in various forms, is the office of genius and the end of art.” But in its denial of these universal truths through its emphasis on depicting the mundane, and even the sordid, realism is “practical atheism applied to art” (67).

Supporters of realism, of course, disagreed about what “lifts the imagination” and about what counts as “universal facts.” For H. H. Boysen, the realist aims “to portray the manners of his time, deals by preference with the normal rather than the exceptional phases of life, and … arouses not the pleasure of surprise, but that of recognition” (148). The result, as Clarence Darrow argued, is that the accurate representation of ordinary life lifts the imagination to recognize the universal in common experience: “It is from the realities of life that the highest idealities are born” (140). And that ideal is democracy; realism, according to Darrow, is a genre for social progress: “The greatest artists of the world today are telling facts and painting scenes that cause humanity to stop and think, and ask why one should be a master and another a serf—why a portion of the world should toil and spin, should wear away their strength and lives, that the rest may live in idleness and ease” (141).

On the surface, it seems like such a minor cause: with the nation entering its worst economic depression until the 1930s, with 15,000 businesses—including the nation’s five largest railroads—going bankrupt in 1893, and with 20 percent of the nation’s industrial workforce unemployed (McMath 181), a number of highly skilled writers devoted their considerable energies to debating in the nation’s magazines whether realism or romanticism is the best form of American literature. For many readers, Howells stood in the vanguard of proponents of realism. From his monthly “Editor’s Study” column in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, beginning in January 1886 and concluding in May 1892 when he resigned to assume the editorship of Cosmopolitan, he attacked romantic fiction, reviewed favorably those novels that agreed with his vision, and articulated the central principles of the movement. The publication of Criticism and Fiction in 1891, a gathering of his Harper’s columns, amounted to realism’s most influential manifesto.

As is common in such debates, the surface issue masked its true objective: envisioning what “America” means, what values it should seek to foster in its imaginative literature. What was at stake was national pride, a sense that American literature had at last arrived and could stand independent of European models. Essayists had been scrapping over the issue since the 1870s, but after the crash of 1893, worsening rural conditions and continued westward expansion raised the debate to its most strident level. The increase in regional fiction also served as a welcome distraction from the economic chaos.

The debate about which form of art best reflected American ideals influenced critical studies by the first generation of academic scholars to attempt to define what is “American” about American literature. As Gerald Graff pointed out in Professing Literature: An Institutional History (1987), the dominance of New Criticism led scholars to conceive “the organic structure of a literary work as a microcosm of collective psychology or myth and thus made New Criticism into a method of cultural analysis” (117)—as reflected in the titles of such influential works as F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance (1941), Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950), R. W. B. Lewis’s The American Adam (1955), and Richard Chase’s influential The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957). That these works, and others that Graff lists, were part of a larger cultural project to promote America as a global power during the Cold War can be seen by the establishment of the Fulbright Program in 1946, designed to promote American values abroad through international educational exchange, and by the establishment of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts in 1965, designed to promote culture within America. The genesis of the Center for Editions of American Authors, sponsored by the Modern Language Association in 1963 and designed to create approved texts of classic American authors, further solidified the focus on American authors as central to academic study and teaching.

The scholarship devoted to American literary realism has long wrestled with problems of definition. Is realism a genre, with a particular form, content, and technique? Is it a style, with a distinctive artistic arrangement of words, characters, and description? Or is it a period, usually placed as occurring after the Civil War and concluding somewhere around the onset of World War I? Three of the early important books on the subject, influenced by the reigning desire to establish the parameters of distinctive American literary culture, attempted studies in definition. Harold H. Kolb’s The Illusion of Life: American Realism as a Literary Form (1964) sought to define realism through discussion of the aesthetic practices of Henry James, Twain, and Howells. Bringing a New Critical attention to style and form, Kolb concludes that “the narrative developments and innovations made by the realists—the architectural improvements in the house of fiction … [have] been the most influential aspect of realism for modern authors” (143–144). For Warner Berthoff, in The Ferment of Realism: American Literature, 1884–1919 (1965), realism is “a standard of profound though often sublimated rebellion” against past literature and its culture and a reflection of contemporary “fears, hopes, tensions, excitements, animosities, secessions and visions of the future” (5), a rebellion that reflects “the struggle not for freedom but with freedom; the struggle to find a decent and manageable footing for human life and work (including the work of art) within the mass secular society and ungoverned technological order of modern times” (46–47). Berthoff focuses not on literary art but on realism as social history, a focus reflecting the national preoccupation with defeating communism and promoting democratic capitalism and which is neatly encapsulated by the dedication to the book: “To Liberalism and Democracy, the good causes, in whose ambiguous service the work surveyed in this volume was mostly written.” And Edwin Cady, in The Light of Common Day: Realism in American Fiction (1971), attempted a synthesis to define realism by describing “six major characteristics”: “It began as a negative movement with (1) the customary features of a literary revolt and (2) a new notion of reality from which to be critical of its past. It developed (3) a positive method and content, and (4) its own ethical outlook. It (5) involved itself in a major, but losing, battle for American public taste. Finally (6), in its latest stages it turned toward the psychologism which was to succeed it” (6). For Cady, realism reflects “the experience of reality as a common vision” that “would make us better citizens, more loyal to our loves, more perceptive in critique, more faithful to perspectives clearly seen.” In short, realism “would tend to be democratic” (20, 21).

These early influential studies established the parameters for later book-length treatments of the subject that would challenge these initial definitions, extend the term realism to include writers excluded by earlier studies, and explore such topics as the workings of the professional marketplace, the capitalist economy underpinning realism, the role of realism in defining the middle class while also disenfranchising lower classes, and especially tracing the many permutations of race in realist texts. Six important books in the 1980s and 1990s charted new directions for the study of American realism. Eric J. Sundquist’s American Realism: New Essays (1982) includes his frequently quoted introduction, “The Country of the Blue,” in which he argues that the realists “sought to master a bewildering society,” failed, and then “returned ever more feverishly to the imagination” (7). Amy Kaplan’s groundbreaking The Social Construction of American Realism (1988) examines realism’s focus on social change through the representation of class difference and the emergence of mass culture. In Writing Realism: Howells, James, and Norris in the Mass Market (1989), Daniel Borus reveals how changes in the publishing industry shaped the production and characteristics of the realistic novel. Michael Davitt Bell’s The Problem of American Realism (1993) investigates the ideological role of the term realism in defining concepts of masculinity in opposition to the effeminate “artist.” In Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism (1993), Kenneth Warren argues that racial difference informs texts by both white and black writers and that the commitment to support civil rights “undermined the North’s capacity to resist Southern arguments against political equality … through discussions about the American social order” (13). And in Reading for Realism: The History of a Literary Institution (1997), Nancy Glazener shows how public debates about generic categories shaped the production and reception of realism.

More recently, under the influence of new theoretical approaches such as deconstruction, Marxism, and New Historicism, this revisionary project has been further fragmented by questioning the unity of “America” both in literature and in politics and by the turn toward transnationalism and globalism. By my count, more than three dozen books about realism have been published since 2000, suggesting a continuing and vibrant interest that has led scholars to reread the canon established in the previous century by reflecting the interests of a new generation of scholars. These interests include deconstructing the nationalism of earlier scholarship but also expanding what “literature” means by devoting attention to other means of cultural production such as illustration, photography, journalism, and advertising and by examining the role of educational methods, the circulation of texts, and the business of authorship as a means of promoting realistic writings and their associated values.

The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism continues this focus on expanding the boundaries of the subject through chapters that reconsider, enlarge, and extend the topic. Contributors were encouraged both to provide new perspectives on traditional topics (for the benefit of readers who come to this book for an overview) and to suggest innovative approaches that point to future directions. The result is a fresh assessment, one that presents the fullest and most comprehensive study of this vibrant movement in American literature through innovative, expansive essays. Given the diverse nature of the topics and approaches, one would not expect that these chapters would be unified in their approach, but they do express some similar concerns. Chief among them is an awareness that “realism” is an elastic movement, both in terms of its connection to previous and subsequent literary movements and in terms of its component subjects. Another is a concern with inclusiveness of representation and an expansion of boundaries for what realism might be. Still another is a reminder that reading realistic texts is never an isolated act, and our reading is informed by both our previous experience and the uses we make of that reading. Part I, “Contexts of Realisms,” includes seven chapters that examine the genesis of American literary realism and suggest its affinities with other literary movements. The seven chapters in part II, “American Realisms,” collectively argue for reconceiving the work of so-called minority writers as actually part of the mainstream. Four chapters in part III, “Selling Realism,” remind us that how works are circulated deeply affects not only what we consider to be realist but also the values we ascribe to those works. Part IV, “Representing the Real,” includes seven chapters that provide new approaches to the aesthetic representation of science, time, space, and the subjects of medicine, the New Woman, and the middle class. That realists were also drawn to other arts—poetry, drama, illustration, photography, painting, and film—is the subject of part V, “Realism and the Other Arts.” Finally, part VI, “Pedagogical Issues,” concludes the volume with four chapters that discuss how realism might effectively be taught as reflected by experiences on a multiracial campus in the United States, in Germany, and in China and with a look toward realism’s continued vibrancy amid Web 2.0 technologies.

While the participants in the Realism Wars saw a clear demarcation between romance and realism and later academic critics sought to establish realism as a cultural form that expressed American values, recent scholars have been engaged with examining whether clear boundaries exist between the traditional national and literary periods so beloved by teachers and as represented in American literature anthologies. Indeed, much recent scholarship devoted to the subject has explored what might be called border slippage. The chapters in part I explore the history of the meaning of the term realism, in both its transnational and American origins, its relation to other genres, the controversies over the terms local color and regionalism as well as the connection to literary naturalism and modernism, two movements widely thought to follow realism but here seen as integral to the realist project itself.

In “Transnational Precursors of American Realism,” Renate von Bardeleben begins the volume by tracing the influence of the European realists Björnstjerne Björnson, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, and Guy de Maupassant on William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Kate Chopin. By providing an in-depth discussion of the development of the Europeans’ literary practice, she identifies the specific narrative strategies the Americans adopted to represent America’s rising urbanism, the struggles of the social classes, the increase of social mobility, and the representation of women in the industrial age. The next two chapters consider the role of gender in defining realism. In “American Realism and Gender,” Donna M. Campbell offers a magisterial overview of critical efforts to define realism as a masculine field that excluded women writers and readers, who ironically were a primary audience for realistic fiction. The story of the rise of realism in the nineteenth century involves two histories. One is “the familiar story of the transition from romance to realism, which typically progresses” from the romantics in the 1850s to the naturalists in the 1890s and the early twentieth century. But the other is “the story of how that seemingly inevitable progression of mainstream realism was punctuated by disruption and anxieties about gender.” And in “The Feminine Origins of American Literary Realism,” Sophia Forster argues that the work of Elizabeth Stoddard, Rebecca Harding Davis, Louisa May Alcott, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps represents “a transition in literary culture” and a shift in “authorial self-conception” as they sought to establish identities as serious writers rather than merely sentimental authors. Their work, Forster contends, therefore demonstrates a form of generic hybridity as they reworked the gothic plots and imagery as represented by the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne toward an aesthetic that values the contemporary and the everyday.

In “Realism and the Uses of Humor,” John Bird offers a fresh synthesis of the ways in which nineteenth-century American humor influenced realist writers by providing a means to use humor to establish a sense of life, setting, characterization, satire, and social comment. After examining the roots of American humor tradition as represented by Down East humor and Southwestern humor in the first half of the century and the literary comedians and local colorists in the second half, Bird examines key comic scenes and techniques in Henry James’s The American, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham, Charles Chesnutt’s “The Goophered Grapevine,” and Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country to show how these writers use humor as a device in their development of realistic narrative.

Mark Storey brings recent world-systems approaches to the study of world literature to offer a new reading of nineteenth-century American regionalism in “Local Color, World-System; or, American Realism at the Periphery.” Storey argues that regionalist fiction often describes communities that are held in a structurally “peripheral” position that “announces itself in the ‘compromise’ between a dominant form of realism and the persistence of nonrealist generic registers, so that an oscillation between realism and ‘irrealism’ provides us with a better model through which to position American regionalism in literary history.” With examples drawn from the work of Hamlin Garland and Sarah Orne Jewett, he concludes that such fiction is “realist in its tactile details,” and yet the authors “experiment with irrealist narrative devices” to offer “an aesthetic reckoning with modernity’s structured inequality.”

This concern with generic boundaries also animates Anita Duneer’s “Aesthetic Slippage in Realism and Naturalism,” where she examines “the slippages in realist and naturalist aesthetics that transcend traditionally defined genres, terrains, and time periods.” With examples drawn from depictions of savagery in Jack London and Zitkala-Ša; the beast and the divided self in Frank Norris, Henry James, and Theodore Dreiser; and evolutionary discourse in Angelina Weld Grimké, Nella Larsen, and Ann Petry, Duneer closes by discussing two TV series, Breaking Bad and The Wire, to suggest that writers “are still grappling with the intersectional forces [of race, class, and gender] that define territories of privilege and opportunity and shape notions of inclusion and exclusion.”

And in “Realism as Modernism,” Brad Evans questions the tendency to position modernism as against realism, as is the prevailing move in many literary histories and American literature anthologies and especially in the books of the foundational generation of literary scholars. Instead, he argues, realism and modernism “were historically coevolving: realism was also a modern literary movement,” as can especially be seen in the period’s little magazines, known as “ephemeral bibelots.”

As Lee Schweninger reminds us in “Native American Realism,” the chapter that opens part II, writers who are not part of the dominant culture “are first and foremost American writers, but their concerns and settings are local and real,” and therefore the experiences they describe are just as “American” as the experiences depicted by mainstream writers. African American, Asian American, Jewish, and Latino writers also focus on matters central to their identity and experience as Americans and typically resist or challenge prevailing perceptions of them as outside mainstream culture. Of course, there is an irony in grouping these chapters about nonmainstream writers together in a way that, in one sense, serves to reinforce perceptions of them as writing outside the mainstream. But doing so is still useful, since these writers share common concerns. In relying on the aesthetic devices of realism to depict what Howells called “the truthful treatment of material,” these writers sought to remind readers that their varying experiences were similarly American and similarly “true.” So, as Schweninger argues in his chapter, Native writers depicted the social and political consequences of removal and forced assimilation, compulsory attendance at boarding schools that functioned to deny Native identity, and the coercive conversion to Christianity that sought to replace Native beliefs.

In “African American Realism,” Christine A. Wooley contends that in conveying the truth of their experiences, African American writers sought to “counter white assumptions about the nature of black experience” in their depiction of that experience but also that readers’ expectations for realistic discourse shaped the narrative choices of black writers. Because of the persistence of white perceptions of black Americans, African American realism, as exemplified by the work of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles Chesnutt, for example, therefore shows “the diminishing impact of its own narratives on individual actions and what white Americans presumed to know about the real contexts in which early twentieth-century African Americans lived.”

In “Ghetto Realism—and Beyond,” Lori Harrison-Kahan begins by examining Abraham Cahan’s Yekl as an example of the debate over the depiction of Jews in ghetto literature, a debate that focused on whether Cahan’s representation was accurate or a caricature; she then discusses two novels by Emma Wolf, set in San Francisco, which foreground the experience of middle-class Jews. Such a comparison expands “our understanding of early Jewish American realism in terms of gender, class, region, and religion” and “illuminates not only the challenges of ethno-racial representation and self-representation but also the slipperiness of realism itself.”

Julia H. Lee begins “Asian American Realism” by surveying the critical controversy over the aesthetic and political meanings of realism in Asian American literary criticism. Like Wooley and Harrison-Kahan, Lee sees realism as privileging a “truth” that reflects a uniform cultural experience and minimizes difference in its depiction of Asian American identity, “rendering Asian American realist texts complicit in the disciplining of the Asian American subject into something legible for white readers.” To illuminate this process, Lee examines Hisaye Yamamoto’s story “The Legend of Miss Sasagawara,” “to reveal the historically contingent process by which Japanese American identity and community in the internment era is constituted and, simultaneously, always already fracturing.”

For Ramón J. Guerra, Latino identity has been profoundly shaped by a sense of displacement that resulted from the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) and the migrations resulting from the Spanish-American War (1898) and the Mexican Revolution (1910). In “The Politics of US Latino Literature and American Realism,” Guerra begins by discussing María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don as a novel that blends romanticism with a realistic attention to detail to convey the political consequences of the treaty. Guerra then moves on to examine works by Francisco Gonzalo “Pachin” Marín, José Martí, Mariano Azuela, and Américo Paredes, who increasingly used the narrative devices of realism “to be critical, to challenge, to rectify some versions of a hegemonic cultural depiction … [in order] to correct and restructure the purportedly complete versions of real experience.”

Two chapters conclude this part by focusing on writers’ use of ethnic caricature and genres employing racial stereotypes such as the oriental romance and the western to assert identity. In “Ethnic Caricature and the Comic Sensibility,” Jean Lee Cole returns to the uses of humor in realism to argue that the comic sensibility, which often depends on ethnic caricature, provided a means for ethnic and racial minorities “to make meaning, form a collective identity, and foster solidarity.” In discussing the work of writers such as Charles Chesnutt, Stephen Crane, Bruno Lessing, and others, she reminds us that laughter “is an assertion of presence” and that the comic sensibility as reflected in caricature “helped propel modernist revolutions in language, representation, and meaning.” Like Julia Lee, Jolie A. Sheffer, in “Racial Realism,” finds writers of color to be hampered by the narrative structure of realism, a structure that resists the depiction of racial experience. “When authors of color sought to depict racial discrimination,” she argues, “their work was often considered too ‘bitter’ for white audiences.” Accordingly, these writers “redefined realism, through strategic use of racialized genres that had been used to denigrate them, to make political statements about white supremacy and US imperialism.” Writers such as Winnifred Eaton (Onoto Watanna) and Mourning Dove (Christine Quintasket/Humishuma) crafted texts whose nonrealistic elements provided distance for white readers while also highlighting discriminatory experience for writers of color and legitimizing their histories.

In part III, contributors offer fresh perspectives on the role of magazines, newspapers, and publishers in the promotion of realism; on the role of agents and publishing-house editors in the establishment of the profession of authorship; and on the circulation of realistic texts and the occasional resistance to them when more genteel readers sought to censor the depiction of the real. In “The Campaign for Realism in the New York Periodical Press,” Mark J. Noonan returns to the Realism Wars, here focusing on the various skirmishes in periodicals. Observing that such a “war” encompassed a number of battlefields—as a response to the Civil War which inaugurated the realist movement and through the battles over portrayals of gender and class—Noonan notes that writers such as William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, and Jacob Riis depicted “the effects of industrialization and immigration, which led to the massive growth of New York,” as they sought “to make sense of modern America and mold it to their own visions.”

Graham Thompson takes up the question of whether realists emerged as professionals in the new publishing economy of late nineteenth-century America in “Realism and the Profession of Authorship.” After noting the rise of the professional literary agent and the increasing opportunities inherent in the proliferation of magazines and syndication, Thompson argues that a number of factors prevented authorship from attaining the status of a profession: “literary realism was caught up in the wake of a maturing and centralizing publishing system flexible enough to withstand changes in dominant literary genres, tastes, and fashions.” The result was the emergence of writing as a craft rather than as a profession, “a prototype of the gig economy” marked by “payment by piecework and royalties that delayed the emergence of authorship as a sustainable profession.”

In “Realism’s American Readers, 1860–1914,” Charles Johanningsmeier reassesses who read realist texts and the meanings they derived from that reading. He notes the proliferation of publications occasioned by syndicates, reprints, mass-market magazines, and extensive distribution networks that reached rural communities to conclude that these various contexts of publication would have led readers “to create very diverse interpretations” of the texts, especially because “common readers at the time were trained to approach literary texts quite differently from how their counterparts are trained today.” As a result, “those readers’ responses … would not have been the same as those made either by contemporary elite readers such as reviewers or those formulated by literary academics since then.” We therefore can reach only tentative conclusions about how realist texts affected readers.

A number of realist texts have been subject to censorship efforts from the day of their publication up to the present. Caren J. Town surveys the facts and myths concerning censorship in “The Censorship of Realist and Naturalist Novels, Then and Now.” Through examining case studies of works by Mark Twain, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Stephen Crane, Hamlin Garland, Kate Chopin, Theodore Dreiser, and Upton Sinclair, Town finds that the scholarship reveals a “complex and ambiguous tangle of puritanism, practical business decisions, and authorial myth-making” that has benefited the writers by presenting them “as champions of women’s rights or free speech, even if they have to bend the truth,” while it has also served the interests of later critics, whose accounts “resonate with their own values and versions of history.” Town concludes by connecting efforts to censor realist texts to contemporary debates about trigger warnings and safe spaces and to efforts to censor texts in schools.

How realists represented the real has been a concern since critics during the 1880s began debating the form and effects of the movement. As its leading spokesman, Howells described realism’s aesthetics through his “Editor’s Study” columns, where he advocated for specific methods of representing narrative point of view, dialogue, description, characterization, and so forth—all centered on portraying the typical, common life so central to the ideology of democracy. Contributors to part IV move beyond the aesthetics of depicting common life to consider larger issues of representation, ranging from the effects of changes in scientific method, to depictions of geological time, to representing space and consumer consumption, to the illustration of problems posed by medicine, the New Woman, and class identity.

In “Science and Aesthetics in American Realism,” Andrew Hebard examines how the shift in scientific method, from inquiry based on observation and description to a methodology based on analysis of data, affected realistic practice. This shift provided a model for writers “to reconcile realism’s investments in coherent aesthetic forms, particularly the ideals of totality and organic wholeness, with its descriptive practices.” Like Hebard, Melanie Dawson also looks to the effects of new scientific understandings about the nature of time on realistic narratives in “Realist Temporalities and the Distant Past.” Because realism depended on the depiction of what is visible, writers were discomfited by the new discovery of the geological past. “The distant past,” she argues, “posed a particular representational problem, for it demanded a departure from a descriptive approach to narrative, a mode privileged by realists who believed that observation connoted aesthetic discipline.” As a result, “realist literary works exhibit signs of anxiety” manifested through shifting into romance or naturalism or by avoiding the deep past altogether. But writers had more success with nature writing, which did not depend on a human framework.

Gary Totten also takes up how the discovery of geological time affected realistic writing, in “Spaces of Consumption in American Literary Realism,” here focusing on how that discovery drew writers’ attention to humans’ place in nature. Realist works, he argues, “illuminate tensions between natural environments and the social expectations of consumer culture and reveal how such expectations transform natural space” into “social space.” Writers depicted the appropriation of natural spaces as locations for consumer consumption, which both empowered and oppressed individuals and led to a more “nuanced representation of the relationship between human beings, consumer culture, and the natural world.” In “Dwelling in American Realism,” Elif S. Armbruster similarly examines the role of space, specifically the centrality of houses to American realism. The accumulation of wealth during the Gilded Age and the desire to display it led to the home in particular as a site of expression. Bookending her discussion with works by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Edith Wharton, Armbruster elucidates how the homes of realistic fiction reveal character: “As realism evolved and modernism took hold after World War I, writers and designers alike embraced styles that were functional, pure, and free of any decorative or historical associations.”

Three chapters conclude this part by examining the representation of medicine, the New Woman, and the middle class. In “Realism and Medicine,” Phillip Barrish explores three representative novels—Henry James’s Washington Square, Sarah Orne Jewett’s A Country Doctor, and Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition—in terms of their depiction of “a profession in which society would ultimately invest unique forms of authority, and prestige was anything but uncontested.” The perspectives these authors offer reveal the underlying tensions posed by gender, race, and coercion which remain “powerfully relevant as the United States continues to struggle with how to deliver healthcare that is equitable, compassionate, and genuinely healing.” In “Realism and the New Woman,” Leslie Petty observes that “many of the best-known realist works we might identify as ‘New Woman’ novels do not, in fact, depict confident, politically conscious, or (intentionally) radical characters.” Instead, they depict “the lives of women still under the sway of the True Woman ideal,” who are struggling with the oppressive nature of marriage, the desire for freedom, and the lack of autonomy. Not until the early twentieth century do New Women become commonplace, and then “they also became more narrow: more white, more heteronormative, more middle-class, more nativist.” And in “Realism and the Middle-Class Balancing Act,” Patrick Chura examines notions of “cross-class empathy” as framed by the effects of capitalism and social class. Novels such as William Dean Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes “balance middle-class identities and loyalties with the desire for sympathetic knowledge of the lower classes,” while others such as Jack London’s Martin Eden include “central characters [who] consciously attempt to conform with prevailing class norms rather than oppose them.” The novels therefore depict “a balancing act where social identity is concerned, sending messages of both complicity and subversion” in capitalist class relations.

While realism has been most closely associated with fiction, creative artists in other fields have also been attracted to the genre’s aesthetic, cultural, and political roots. Two chapters begin part V by exploring the influence of realism on poetry and drama, the two genres also relying on the written word. In “Realism and Poetry,” Jonathan N. Barron recovers the realist aesthetic of such poets as Robert Frost, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, and Sara Teasdale, whose poetry in some ways has been regarded as an anomaly in the development of modernism. Poetic realism was a reaction against both the genteel and the aesthetic traditions, and what stands out is “the intellectual quality of its pragmatism, which presented a new and fundamentally different attitude toward the world,” and emphasized “the interior space of the self as depicted in the new science of psychology,” focused on everyday speech rather than poetic diction, and which “rejected generic nouns in favor of particulars.”

For Eileen J. Herrmann, in “The Evolution of American Dramatic Realism,” dramatic realism can best be characterized by its resiliancy and flexibility. Beginning with the influence of European drama and its adaptation by such playwrights as James A. Herne and Rachel Crothers, Herrmann demonstrates dramatic realism’s adaptive nature by showing how such writers as Susan Glaspell, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller incorporated expressionistic techniques into realistic plays; realism also provided the foundation for experiments with form and language by later playwrights such as David Mamet, August Wilson, and Sam Shepard. Realism’s continued influence, according to Herrmann, is that “it responds to its historical moment, continues to embrace the domestic, and reaches for metaphoric truth.”

The remaining chapters in this part explore the visual contexts of realistic texts. Many of the works now part of the realist canon originally appeared with illustrations that, as Adam Sonstegard points out in “Visual Art, Intertextuality, and Authorship in the Golden Age of Illustration,” can substantially alter interpretation. Recuperating the graphic contexts of the original publication of texts reveals that illustrations spoiled readers’ expectations, compromised a work’s narrative authority, or comically caricatured a work’s serious characterizations. He suggests that the archival recuperation of literary-visual intertextuality “complicates our critical understandings of the authority that inheres in realist authorship.”

Scholars have long noted that realist writers often adopted metaphors drawn from photography and painting, and two chapters explore the nature of this figuration. In “American Realism and Photography,” Astrid Böger examines the shift in realistic texts as they sought to respond to the supposed superior representational authority of photography. Writers such as Sarah Orne Jewett rendered “moral insight strictly in perceptual terms so that seeing and knowing virtually become one,” while others, such as Henry James and Paul Laurence Dunbar, focused on subjective experience and memory, which were impossible to capture in a photograph. Böger notes that while a photographer-writer such as Jacob Riis “combined photographs and text into one record whose overall aim was to provide evidence of certain undesirable realities calling for change,” James Agee and Walker Evans raised “ethical questions about the right to observe and picture others less fortunate than oneself.” Peter Betjemann, in “Realist Literature, Painting, and Immediacy,” is less interested in the decorative or observational parallels between realist writing and painting and more concerned with how “painting offered a way for writers to reflect on the relation of visual representation to history, change, and the construction of identity.” After first highlighting the shared strategies employed by writers and painters to depict unconventional women and orienting the eye to sociological critique, Betjemann turns to how time is represented in the two mediums: painters tended to minimize narrative sequence, while writers depended on it. Finally, in “Realism and the Cinematic Gaze,” Nicolas S. Witschi explores the conundrum that while early cinema held relatively little interest for realists, realists’ work has proved to be quite popular with filmmakers, who adapted the realists’ interest in characters’ perspective to create films that explored the possibilities of defining and directing the viewer’s perspective.

While scholarly research into various facets of realism has dominated academic discussion, the final chapters, in part VI, remind us that we scholars convey our research to students in our classes, and how we teach matters just as much as what we teach, especially during a time when public support of the humanities is in decline and undervalued. These chapters therefore explore the political contexts underlying the teaching of realism. In “Teaching Literary Realism in Transnational America,” Nathaniel Cadle argues that foregrounding transnational approaches in classrooms enables students, administrators, and the broader community to recognize the value of studying literary realism, for a greater awareness of the recognition of one’s self in the frame of multicultural literature becomes a “powerful tool for social justice, sometimes inspiring social movements but also temporarily filling the emotional needs of the disempowered.”

But American realism is not taught just in American universities, and other countries have also been attracted to the subject. The next two chapters offer perspectives on teaching realism in countries where the advent of instruction about American realism was explicitly political. Klaus H. Schmidt, in “Teaching American Realism in Germany,” offers a fascinating data-driven study of the problematic beginnings of American studies in pre- and postwar Germany, an analysis of the relative importance of American realist literature in German university courses and research publications, and a survey of German Americanists on methods and experiences of teaching US realism and naturalism in the Federal Republic of Germany. While the rise of American studies and the reception of American realists in a multiethnic nation strongly influenced by US culture can be called a success story, Schmidt suggests that it will take new didactic approaches to demonstrate that the core period of the realist tradition continues to be relevant for a new generation of students.

In “Teaching and Researching American Literature and American Realism in China,” Yuping Wang traces the origins of American literature study in general and realism in particular amid the political transformation of China. Like Schmidt, Wang surveys a number of university teachers about their interests and goals to provide a historical perspective of how the teaching and study of realism responded to a changing political system that affected what works were taught and the scholarly approaches to those texts. Since the New Culture reform movement beginning in 1915, literary works have been translated and studied to introduce American culture and American ways of life to students and to improve students’ language proficiency.

Finally, in “Realism 2.0” Augusta Rohrbach takes up Cadle’s point that how and what we teach can become “a powerful tool for social justice” and inspire social movements by looking to the future of teaching realism with Web 2.0 technologies. After discussing the ways data-modeling technologies can reveal patterns for interpretation, Rohrbach turns to how these technologies can update the social-reform agenda of realism as exemplified by William Dean Howells’s attempted intervention into the Haymarket Riot in 1886. “The advent of Web 2.0 techologies,” she argues, “offers students a way to harness the genre’s sense of social purpose to knowledge-sharing mechanisms,” to become “a vehicle for political consciousness-raising in real time.” The result, she suggests, is “Realism 2.0,” a realism that enables readers to engage in their world, which is less text-centric than it was for the writers who are the subject of this handbook.

Realism studies has emerged as a contested site in which the boundaries—in the sense of origin and “expiration”—of the discipline have been not so much disputed as extended. Like the first generation of scholars who interpreted realistic writing through the lens of democracy, today’s scholarship reflects the issues that are particular to our times—a period when racial equality continues to be divisive and exclusion from the aspirations of the American dream still haunts many, a time when we are still battling over matters of gender and the effects of scientific discovery on our concept of self, an era when realism is no longer perceived as the province of the written word; the desire to represent life accurately also extends to visual media and, especially, to social engagement. We have thus returned to a point that Warner Berthoff made in 1965: realist writers, and the scholars who interpret their works, are engaged in “a standard of profound though often sublimated rebellion, a movement of spirit directed against particular and identifiable new formations of civil culture and quickened by particular and identifiable fears, hopes, tensions, excitements, animosities, secessions, and visions of the future” (4–5). Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.