My major goal is to produce a history that is informed by recent scholarly understandings of American literature and culture, but remains accessible and engaging to an educated reading audience. Thus, the book will have to avoid the mere recitation of names, dates, and facts while still being rooted in the dense texture of history, particularly the history of dramatic change and social turmoil that marks this period. It will have to recognize the achievements of the major literary figures, especially Mark Twain and Henry James, without stooping to the level of literary hagiography or pretending that literary history can be merely the story of great men. The discussion of these figures will not occur in separate chapters but be integrated into the entire book. My goal is to place the work of these and other writers fully into the contexts of the time so that a reader can understand how the various phases of Henry James reflect and respond to the flux of cultural history. Thus, the syntax of James''s major phase needs to be tied to aesthetic movements (especially, the rise of impressionism), political developments (in particular, issues of class and gender), and an emerging science that will challenge moral and epistemological boundaries (reflected perhaps most notably in Freudian psychology). Mark Twain''s career also provides a kind of paradigm for American cultural experience during this period: he began his literary career with an editor named Bliss and ended with one named Paine. The movement from bliss to pain is part of what my narrative will be about. My over-riding aim, however, is to avoid over-simplification while still providing a meaningful guide to the period. This requires that I root the individual texts into multiple cultural contexts. Thus, Twain''s
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur''s court is best understood when immersed in multiple generic frames, including the international novel (which usually contrasted American democracy and European values), the satire of romanticism in its contemporary form (Tennysonian medievalism), the historical novel (probably the most popular form of the time), and an emerging science fiction (which began to challenge faith in progress and technology). I hope to be able to provide both a lively narrative and a detailed analysis of culture and texts.
The overall shape of this history will be marked by three stages: the rise of realism; its complex development into literary forms that struggle to grasp elusive social and psychological realities; and the emergence of naturalism as a literary movement that both extends and rejects the basic premises of realism and that will ultimately culminate in an emerging modernism. Such an overview may seem conventional, but the actual history will challenge some old-fashioned notions of the period. The section dealing with the rise of realism will emphasize the contributions of the New England women who first made regionalism an effective and sometimes powerful literary tool (Stowe, Davis, Phelps, Cooke) and whose best evocations of local life are imbued with the incipient feminism that will finally emerge in Jewett, Freeman, and Chopin. Feminist issues will be important in the discussion of both male and female writers - it is, of course, Henry James who insists throughout his long career that the secret nature of American life is intimately connected with the peculiarities of female identity in our culture. The treatment of local color will confront the sentimentality, nostalgia, and escapism that sometimes mask injustice and bigotry, but it will also explore how regionalism liberated some of the most significant writers of the period, empowering some women to raise troubling questions about the emptiness of domestic life and leading some men as well as some women to confront the contradictions between democratic ideals and American realities. Without lapsing into reductionism, the chapter on regionalism must outline the various traits that distinguish our various regional literatures, thus enabling the reader, for instance, to understand how literary comedy is radically different in the Northeast, South, Midwest, and West and how Mark Twain''s success stems partly from his ability to fuse various regional forms into what will be hailed as American humor. Thus, the text ends up confronting the competing pressures of regional and national impulses that continue to shape American culture.
Throughout the history, I attempt to raise the basic contradictions and paradoxes that provide realism with its primary energy - this is the period that discovered the child as literary subject, but our most powerful exemplars, including both Huck Finn and Turn of the Screw are really about abused children and the nature of child abuse. The treatment of realism will need to deal with the form''s long-recognized concern with social issues and political reform, and I hope to give a fuller treatment of the period''s treatment of social class than can be found in most conventional histories. Nevertheless, I also plan to emphasize Howells'' recognition that the American literary mind was fundamentally turned inward in ways that made psychological realities of equal importance to social facades. Thus, the period of realism coincides with the great age of the supernatural tale, which exemplifies realism''s underlying epistemological concern with the question of what is real while also providing a powerful literary vehicle for the confrontation with sexual repression and social injustice. The history I propose will be distinguished by its insistence on recognizing the importance of genres that have been unjustly neglected in other treatments of this period, including the ghost story, the historical novel, the adventure tale, detective fiction, and the western. Recent scholarship has begun to unearth more significant poetry than previous scholars recognized, and the history will have to find a way of incorporating these insights and discoveries as well as paying attention to experiments in drama. The history will recognize the importance of race as a subject matter and the rising stature of certain writers, perhaps most notably Charles Chesnutt. While exploring the achievements of Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, Dunbar, Dunbar-Nelson, and other African Americans, the chapter focusing on race and immigration will also deal with other ethnic voices (i.e., Sui Sin Far, Abraham Cahan, Maria Mena, Zitkala-Sa) as well as white writers who attacked racism (Cable, Tourgee) or attempted to justify it (Page, Dixon).
The concluding section will focus on Naturalism and the relationship to an emerging modernism with emphasis on Wharton, Crane, and London. These three are central to my purpose because they represent most fully naturalism''s uneasy war with the realistic tradition and the varieties of responses that scientific determinism could elicit from writers of talent or genius. Dreiser will be mentioned in passing, but he really represents the start of 20th-century traditions and I expect that he will be important to the author of the next volume of this history. Since I do not have outlines for the other projected volumes, I have to emphasize that I am presuming that some overlap between volumes will be necessary in order to ensure that each volume can stand alone. Of course, attention must be paid to precursors as well as to the ways in which the traditions outlined in my text flowed into twentieth-century literary movements. My proposed volume will begin with the end of the Civil War and include some discussion of Dickinson and Whitman, both of whom will, I presume, receive fuller treatment in the volume immediately preceding mine in the series. It is essential that I briefly discuss the romantic precursors in order to detail the competing ways in which romanticism and realism attempted to define the literary needs of an emerging democratic culture and to dispel the old myth that romantic modes dominate our fictional traditions. The volume will end with a brief discussion of how realistic modes and values became vital to certain modern writers (most notably Fitzgerald, Frost, and Cather) and how the ideas raised by naturalism formed the philosophical underpinnings of much later writing and raised the issues that Eliot, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Ellison would later confront in other ways.
The Period:
At one time, critics referred to the years between the American civil war and the start of World War I as the "genteel age" in American literature, but recent scholars agree that it was actually a period of enormous violence as well as astonishing change and radical transformation. The reality of political violence can be represented most acutely by one statistic: three of the seven Presidents elected between 1860 and 1900 were assassinated in office; in other words, of our 43 Presidents, three out of the four who died in office were murdered during this period. At the start of this period, the United States was a relatively young nation attempting to heal the wounds of the most costly and most violent war in our history - (the casualty figures of the American Civil War exceed that of all prior and subsequent American wars combined). In 1865, the nation was primarily agricultural and the bulk of it was unsettled - at least by white Euro-centric standards. Things changed quickly. In 1876, the nation experienced and celebrated its first centennial. By 1890, the frontier, which had once seemed endless, was declared closed and the United States was clearly on its way to becoming a heavily industrialized nation with imperialist ambitions. Jefferson''s idealized agrarian vision was demolished by the early 20th century. Farm life gave way to factory labor. Large cities grew at ferocious rates, packing masses of desperate immigrants into filthy slums. As large-scale