Ever since William Dean Howells declared his "realism war" in the 1880s, literary historians have regarded the rise of realism and naturalism as the signal development in post-Civil War American fiction. Questioning this generalization, Michael Davitt Bell investigates the role that these terms played in the social and literary discourse of the 1880s and 1890s. He argues that "realism" and "naturalism" were ideological categories used to promote a version of "reality" based on radically anti-"literary" and heavily gendered assumptions.In chapters on William Dean Howells, Frank Norris, Mark Twain, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Sarah Orne Jewett, Bell examines the effects that ideas about realism and naturalism had on writers. He demonstrates that, for many of them, claiming to be a realist or a naturalist was a way to provide assurance that one was a "real" man rather than an "effeminate" artist.

The first collection to offer all of the pioneering American writer's fictional work reveals her mastery of the hidden dramas of life along the Maine coast, and includes her masterpiece, The Country of the Pointed Firs, and A Country Doctor.

Product Description: In Culture, Genre, and Literary Vocation, Michael Davitt Bell charts the important and often overlooked connection between literary culture and authors' careers. Bell's influential essays on nineteenth-century American writers—originally written for such landmark projects as The Columbia Literary History of the United States and The Cambridge History of American Literature—are gathered here with a major new essay on Richard Wright...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Three major conventional figures dominated Hawthorne's romances: the noble Founding Father, the "narrow Puritan," and the rebellious daughter. Daniel Bell examines the ways in which Hawthorne used these and other conventional characters to formulate his own sense of New England history...read more