Revisionist Approaches to American Realism and Naturalism ed. by Jutta Ernst, Sabina Matter-Seibel, and Klaus H. Schmidt (review)

This collection of eleven essays by German and American scholars on late-nineteenth and early- twentieth century American realism and naturalism stems from a conference held at Mainz's Johannes Gutenberg University. As the editors explain in their brief introduction and as Winfried Fluck discusses at length in the volume's initial essay, the "revisionist approaches" of the book's title underscore the intent of the collection to provide a critique of the revisionist criticism of the last several generations. This criticism, Fluck maintains, has ignored profitable traditional methodologies of literary criticism and history for an excessive concern initially with philosophical problems and later with the literary work as a cultural artifact. Cultural criticism is particularly flawed in that it is often used to confirm political and social preoccupations of our own time. As Fluck states in his incisive essay, much criticism of this kind is really "about whether and to what extent American literary realism of the nineteenth century has pursued the politics of the new social movements of present-day America." Thus, a corrective revisionist phase is required, one that constitutes a return to more traditional methods, principally in a return to criticism that is more author- than culture-centered.

Although the essays that follow these introductions occasionally refer to the shared purpose of the volume, they reflect this purpose principally by their methodologies. That is, they deal with a wide range of subjects, but unlike much earlier revisionism, whose distinctive form is a survey of many works in relation to a culturally significant theme, each concentrates on one or two authors or a specific work, and Foucault is entirely absent from their bibliographies. The essays as a whole, however, do break with previous traditional criticism in their much greater scope. Some are devoted to such canonical authors as Howells and Dreiser, but many also explore at length works that earlier would have been considered minor and authors not usually considered realist or naturalist—a relatively obscure short story by Mary Wilkins Freeman, for example, and Robert Frost's North of Boston.

Günter Leypold's "1890s Middlebrow: Sister Carrie as an Artist Novel" exhibits several positive qualities of this latest stage of revisionism, qualities shared (each in its own way) by many other essays in the volume. Leypold consciously discards the consumerist emphasis, based on Carrie's early Chicago experiences, that has dominated criticism of Sister Carrie for over thirty years. Instead, he offers a reading derived from the theme of the artist as hero, a theme related to its contemporary popularity and one which he finds present throughout the work in the form of Carrie's developing artistic sensibility. He has thus drawn upon the traditional critical methodologies of period-centered genre analysis and of close reading to produce a convincing interpretation of the thematic coherence of what is often held to be a confused work.

Winfried Fluck notes in his introductory essay that though there is some movement by the scholarly community away from earlier revisionism, dissertations in American literature are still almost entirely culturally centered. It appears that we will have to wait another generation to discover whether the kind of criticism displayed in this volume returns to the central position it once occupied.