Overview

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? This volume aims to widen the scope of study beyond mere definition, however, by expanding the boundaries of the subject through essays that reconsider and enlarge upon such questions. The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism aims to take stock of the scholarly work in the area and map out paths for future directions of study. The Handbook offers 35 vibrant and original essays of new interpretations of the artistic and political challenges of representing life. It is the first book to treat the subject topically and thematically, in wide scope, with essays that draw upon 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. Contributors here tease out the workings of a particular concept through a variety of authors and their cultural contexts. A set of essays 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 pedagogic issues in the teaching of realism. As a whole, this volume forges exciting new paths in the study of realism and writers' unending labor to represent life accurately.

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9780190642891

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Reviews

This large, interesting, and useful collection of thirty-five essays by American, British, and Chinese scholars... can be seen as a small library which enriches our understnding on American literary realism in the later-nineteen-hundreds and expands to discussions of human thought ad art in American and world literature and culture across almost two centries. * Harold H. Kolb, University of Virginia, American Literary Realism *

Author Information

Keith Newlin is Professor of English at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where he teaches courses in American literary realism and naturalism, modernism, and drama. The editor of Studies in American Naturalism, he is also the author of Hamlin Garland, A Life and editor of The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism, among other books.

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