Routes into American realism
Realism is usually associated with American literature
written after the Civil War. This essay argues that realism was also a significant
force during the late-eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. The argument proceeds
in three parts. First, the close entanglement of British and American literary
culture meant that many of the forces driving the emergence of realism in Britain
were imported to the United States. This is evident in the popularity of British
sentimental, gothic, and historical novelists and in the appetite for Charles
Dickens and William M. Thackeray. The culture of reprinting, which dominated
American publishing before 1850, ensured that Americans were more likely to read
British rather than American writing. Second, realism established a foothold in
American culture in non-novelistic forms, particularly the sketch and short story,
which found outlets in a vibrant periodical culture. Third, the essay shows that
even writers who self-consciously wrote romances rather than novels – Nathaniel
Hawthorne and Herman Melville – relied on realist poetic techniques that critics
have often underplayed in an effort to emphasize their romanticism. Realism in the
United States had a long and diverse history and emerged prior to the major social
and cultural changes that marked the period after the 1850s.
Article outline
- 1.Critical contexts
- 2.British realism in late eighteenth-century America
- 3.Realism and the gothic
- 4.James Fenimore Cooper and the historical novel
- 5.Charles Dickens in America
- 6.The prose sketch and American magazine realism
- 7.The realism of slave narratives
- 8.Reassessing the beginnings of realism in American literature
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Works cited