Preface to the first edition Preface to the 1981 reissue 1. American realism: a grammar of motives 2. Novels and novelists: the era of Howells and James 3. Literature of argument 4. Lives of the Americans: the class of the '70s 5. Renaissance: 1912 and after Select bibliography Index of names and titles Index of selected topics.

The Ferment of Realism: American Literature 1884-1919.

Did sentiment ever go out of style? Certainly, a classic account of literary history made it seem so. According to this once prevailing view, the discourse of sentiment first appeared in the eighteenth century, emerging in the philosophical writing of Lord Shaftesbury and Adam Smith and in the novels of Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, and Henry MacKenzie. Although gently mocked in Jane Austen, its range only expanded alongside the nineteenth-century growth of the novel, reaching the apogee of its influence in the Victorian era, when, especially in the US, it became the province of women writers and a prime vehicle of domestic ideology. By the later third of the nineteenth century, however, the decadence of sentiment finally became too much to ignore and first the realists and then their heirs among the modernists came forth to vilify and dispatch it. As Werner Berthoff explained in his once canonical history The Ferment of Realism (1981), the innovative writing of the Gilded Age and of the Progressive Era sprang “out of professional distaste for a polite literature that was rotten ripe with idealizing sentiment and genteel affectation” (4). Or so it seemed to the generation of modernist critics who laid the foundations for the postwar discipline of English. For several decades now, however, their convictions have been losing credibility. The challenges came especially from feminist scholarship, pioneered by Jane Tompkins, and carried forward by critics and literary historians like Joan Hedrick, Lora Romero, and Karen Sánchez-Eppler. These critics illuminated the depth and interest of nineteenth-century sentimental fiction while also revealing the glib condescension, and the defense of gender hierarchy—the “melodramas of beset manhood,” as Nina Baym memorably put it—underlying the dismissal of sentimental fiction. Revisionist accounts of realism and modernism meanwhile only emphasized the doubtfulness of the antisentimentalists’

Structures of Feeling

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American Women Writers, Visual Vocabularies, and the Lives of Literary Regionalism

William Dean Howells and the Insurance of the Real

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The Ferment of Realism: American Literature 1884-1919.

References

Structures of Feeling

American Women Writers, Visual Vocabularies, and the Lives of Literary Regionalism

William Dean Howells and the Insurance of the Real

The City as Metaphor in Selected Novels of James Purdy and Saul Bellow

Crafting Radical Fictions: Late-Nineteenth Century American Literary Regionalism and Arts and Crafts Ideals

Related Papers (5)

American realism : new essays

American Literary Realism

The rise of realism : American literature from 1860 to 1888

Ferment in the Field? Review Essay

Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature