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American Literature 75.3 (2003) 656-658



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American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige, 1880–1995. By Phillip Barrish. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press. 2001. x, 213 pp. $54.95.
The Culture Concept: Writing and Difference in the Age of Realism. By Michael A. Elliott. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press. 2002. xxviii, 239 pp. Cloth, $60.95; paper, $21.95.
Regional Fictions: Culture and Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. By Stephanie Foote. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press. 2001. vi, 218 pp. Cloth, $55.00; paper, $24.95.

These three studies, each the first book of a promising scholar, offer interesting innovations in the tradition of realism studies laid out by Amy Kaplan's The Social Construction of American Realism (1988) and Richard Brodhead's Cultures of Letters (1993). Kaplan and Brodhead connect realism closely with the interests and concerns of dominant political and social groupings, but both emphasize the complexity and contingency of that dominance as well as the intricacy of its literary effects. Following these examples but advancing significantly into new materials and questions, Barrish, Elliott, and Foote all presume that realist fiction is involved in important social or political contests (variously defined) but home in on the overdeterminations, contradictions, and displacements of the literary texts they examine.

In Barrish's American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige, the key contests are "[i]nternecine struggles over cultural status among different middle-class fractions" (4). Barrish's central project is the tracing of a range of textual moments in realist texts organized around a display of tastes—usually a competition between tastes. By emulating Pierre Bourdieu's attention to the complexities of taste without pretending to be able to chart these tastes securely on a social map, Barrish can note the many and flexible ways in which characters and historical persons invoke the rhetorical move of being "realer than thou" (129). His commentary on these moments is wonderfully illuminating, as when he identifies the bid for superiority embodied in a "‘meta-taste' [as] a taste for tastes" (30) in Howells's The Rise of Silas Lapham and when he marks the peculiar kind of distinction [End Page 656] embodied in the tendency for certain realist texts to linger over the contradictions and discrepancies in the characters' lives and views.

The weakness of the approach is that Barrish doesn't really explain what the correlations that he finds across texts might mean. His terminology frequently points toward historical phenomena (status categories, class fractions, particular episodes in the construction of masculinity) that seem to be treated both as textual effects and as something more. For example, the class fractions battling over realism are never precisely identified: the main axis of struggle seems to be an unsurprising one between the cultivated people who acquire "realist taste" (17) and the members of the same general socioeconomic stratum who resist it. The tracing of textual correlations at the expense of plausible historical accounting culminates in a perplexing final chapter that credits the American reputations of an assortment of recent theorists (Trilling, Guillory, De Man, Copjec, and Butler) to the ground they share with American literary realism, since they all claim to be rejecting something less real or authentic on behalf of something more so.

Elliott's The Culture Concept and Foote's Regional Fictions both focus on regionalist American fiction, which seems poised to become the new central category and archive around which realist texts and problematics can be organized. While Elliot doesn't specifically identify his canon as regionalist—he mainly invokes "realism," as his subtitle suggests—the main literary examples he considers all fit Brodhead's model of regionalism as "a work of ethnic imagining" (Brodhead, 177). Foote attends to this ethnic imagining directly, characterizing regionalist works by their shifting, exploratory contrasts between "the stranger" and "the native" (19): "the dialect-speaking regional type is an uncanny shadow version of an incompletely understood and assimilated ethnic...

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