1
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- James, Twain, and Howells
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2
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- Romance focuses “upon the extraordinary, the mysterious, the imaginary.”
–Bliss Perry (1903)
- Nathaniel Hawthorne: the romance “has fairly a right to present that
truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’s own
choosing or creation” (Preface to The House of the Seven Gables)
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3
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- 1. Renders reality in less volume and detail.
- 2. Prefers action to character.
- 3. Reality does not impinge as frequently on the
action of the piece as in a novel.
- 4. Characters not as complexly related to each other
or to their society.
- 5. Human relationships tend to be narrowly or
obsessively involved rather than displaying a range of human
relationships.
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4
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- 6. Origins and class of characters sometimes
irrelevant, sometimes a mystery.
- 7. Plot is highly colored, featuring astonishing
events that have symbolic or allegorical import.
- 8. Tends toward mythic, allegorical, or symbolic
forms; Heightened diction.
- 9. According to William Gilmore Simms, the romance is
loftier than the novel and does not confine itself to what is known or
even probable: "it grasps at the possible."
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5
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- Realism is “that which does not shrink from the commonplace (although
art dreads the commonplace) or from the unpleasant (although the aim of
art is to give pleasure) in its effort to depict things as they are,
life as it is” (229) and is used “in opposition to conventionalism, to
idealism, to the imaginative, and to sentimentalism” (222). Bliss Perry
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6
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- Realism sets itself at work to consider characters and events which are
apparently the most ordinary and
uninteresting, in order to extract from these their full value
and true meaning. In short, realism reveals. Where we thought nothing worth of
notice, it shows everything to be
rife with significance. George Parsons Lathrop, 'The Novel and its
Future," Atlantic Monthly 34 (September 1874): 313‑24.
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7
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- Realism, n. The art of depicting nature as it is seen by toads. The
charm suffusing a landscape painted by a mole, or a story written by a
measuring-worm. --Ambrose Bierce The Devil's Dictionary (1911)
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8
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- 1. Renders reality closely and in comprehensive
detail.
- 2. Characters appear in their real complexity of
temperament and motive; They are in explicable relation to nature, to
each other, to their social class, to their own past.
- 3. Character is more important than action and plot;
Complex ethical choices are often the subject.
- 4. Events will usually be plausible. Realistic novels
avoid the sensational, dramatic elements of naturalistic novels and
romances.
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9
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- 5. Class is important; The novel has traditionally
served the interests and aspirations of an insurgent middle class. (See
Ian watt, The Rise of the Novel).
- 6. Selective presentation of reality with an emphasis
on verisimilitude, even at the expense of a well-made plot.
- 7. Diction is natural vernacular, not heightened or
poetic; Tone may be comic, satiric, or matter-of-fact.
- 8. Objectivity in presentation becomes increasingly
important: overt authorial comments or intrusions diminish as the
century progresses.
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10
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- Romance
- Aspired to the ideal
- Thought to be more genteel since it did not show the vulgar details of
life
- Realism
- Thought to be more democratic
- Critics stressed the potential for vulgarity and its emphasis on the
commonplace
- Potential “poison” for the pure of mind
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11
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- "Realism is, in fact,something in the air. Realism is the state of
mind, and it is the state of mind of the nineteenth century.” --Richard Watson Gilder, 1887 (Editor
of Scribner’s Monthly)
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12
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- I found . . . that to do full justice to Mark Twain as a human being
would require a thesis so detailed, learned and spacious that there is
no time for it to-night.
He and you will rejoice in this, I am sure, for thus is, at least
temporarily, averted that fatal result which was intimated in a recent
English school examination where it was distinctly stated by one of the
contestants that "in the United States people are put to death by
elocution.“
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13
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- Editor of the Atlantic Monthly, 1871-1881
- “Editor’s Study” in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (January 1886- March
1892)
- Criticism and Fiction (1891; collected from “Editor’s Study” columns)
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14
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- Dr. Breen’s Practice (1881)
- A Modern Instance (1882)
- The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885)
- April Hopes (1888)
- Annie Kilburn (1889)
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15
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- “Realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of
material” --William Dean Howells, “Editor’s Study,” November 1889.
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16
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- “We hope the time is coming when not only the artist, but the common,
average man . . . .will reject the ideal grasshopper wherever he finds
it . . . Because it is not like a real grasshopper” --W. D. Howells, 1887
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17
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- We invite our novelists, therefore, to concern themselves with the more
smiling aspects of life, which are the more American, and to seek the
universal in the individual rather than in the commonplace.” –W. D.
Howells, 1886
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18
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- The art of fiction has, in fact, become a finer art in our day than it
was with Dickens and Thackeray . . . . These great men are of the past.
- The new school derives from Hawthorne and George Eliot rather than any
others . . . . This school, which is so largely of the future as well as
the present, finds its chief exemplar in Mr. James.
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19
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- A Literary Combination.
- Mr. H-w-lls: Are you the tallest now, Mr. James?
- Mr. J-mes (ignoring the question): Be so uncommonly kind, H-w-lls, as to
let me down easy: it may be we have both got to grow.
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20
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- In a letter to a friend: “He has little intellectual curiosity; so here
he stands with his admirable organ of style, like a poor man holding a
diamond and wondering how he can use it.”
- At this point, James had not published even one novel. He had published
reviews and a story.
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21
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- He is animated by a love of the common, the immediate, the familiar and
vulgar elements of life, and holds that in proportion as we move into
the rare and strange we become vague and arbitrary; That truth of
representation, in a word, can be achieved only so long as it is in our
power to test and measure it.
- “William Dean Howells,“Harper's Weekly 30 (19 June 1886): 394-395.
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22
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- “The Art of Fiction,” 1884
- Washington Square (1880)
- The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
- The Bostonians (1886)
- The Princess Casamassima (1886)
- The Aspern Papers (1888)
- The Turn of the Screw (1898)
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23
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- The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel without
incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.
- Experience is never limited and it is never complete; it is an immense
sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web, of the finest silken threads,
suspended in the chamber of consciousness and catching every air-borne
particle in its tissue
- A novel is a living thing, all one and continuous, like every other
organism, and in proportion as it lives will it be found, I think, that
in each of the parts there is something of each of the other parts.
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24
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- We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, what the French call his
donnée; our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it.
- There is an old-fashioned distinction between the novel of character and
the novel of incident . . . . It appears to me as little to the point as
the equally celebrated distinction between the novel and the romance- to
answer as little to any reality. There are bad novels and good novels,
as there are bad pictures and good pictures; but that is the only
distinction in which I see any meaning. . .
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25
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- George Pellew, “The New Battle of the Books,” Forum 5 (July 1888): 564-73.
- Hamilton Wright Mabie, “The Two Eternal Types in Fiction,” 1895, and “A
Typical Novel,” Andover Review 4 (November 1885).
- James Lane Allen, “Realism and Romance,” New York Evening Post, 31 July
1886, p. 4.
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26
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- “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” North American Review, 1895
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884/5)
- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1890)
- Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1895)
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27
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- W. D. Howells
- Henry James
- H. H. Boyesen, “The Great Realists and the Empty Story-Tellers”
- Mark Twain
- Hamlin Garland
- Thomas Sergeant Perry
- George Pellew
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28
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- W. R. Thayer, “The New Story-tellers and the Doom of Realism” Forum 18
(December 1894): 470-80.
- H. C. Vedder.
- Maurice Thompson.
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29
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- Robert Louis Stevenson
- H. Rider Haggard
- Andrew Lang
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30
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- H. C. Vedder. “Can it be that Mr. Howells gives us in his books a fair
representation of life as he has known it? Has his whole experience been of this
stale, flat unprofitable sort?”
- “Has he never known anybody who has a soul above buttons?” American
Writers of Today, 1894.
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31
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- French realism should be called “Epidermism,” not realism, because it
reduces “literature, art, and morals to anarchy.”
- The Rise of Silas Lapham was “produced by Epidermist methods” by an
author who “smacked his lips” over Zola’s filth.
- Picture of Emile Zola.
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32
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- Romance beside his unstrung lute,
Lies stricken mute.
The old-time fire, the antique grace,
You will not find them anyplace,
Polemic, scientific air:
We strip Illusion of her veil;
We vivisect the nightingale
To probe the secret of his note.
The Muse in alien ways remote
Goes wandering.
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33
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- Young women should rise towards idealism, not sag towards realism.
- Art and women are degraded by “servile imitation of nature.”
- Only transcendent idealization in both could save us from “a realistic
vulgarity and commonplace.”
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34
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- Realists represent “literary decadence” and worship “the vulgar, the
commonplace, and the insignificant.”
- The best part of Howells is “romance disguised as realism. His literary
tissue is healthy, the spirit of his work is even, calm, just, and his
purpose is pure,” so he cannot be a realist.
- Picture is Thomas Eakins’s The Gross Clinic (1875).
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35
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- “A large number of readers, who have wearied of minute descriptions of
the commonplace, are to-day often found condemning an author who does
not keep his hero in imminent danger of death through at least
seventy-five percent of his pages.“
--John Kendrick Bangs, 1898
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36
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- “I am comparatively a dead cult with my statues cast down and the grass
growing over them in the pale moonlight” (Selected Letters 6: 31).
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