Late-19th-Century Literature

The scholarship produced during 2003 is a complex mix of perspectives and materials: in the host of essays and books we see evidence not only of the end of the academic apartheid that relegated women and minority writers to the margins but also a greater awareness of the intricate relationship between genre and challenges of aesthetic and political intention and result. We are able now to recognize the democratization of literary study not only in the vastly changing demographics of our individual classrooms but also in the multiplicity of writers and writings that shape our understanding of U.S. literary culture. There may still be an argument offer canon, but both the pedagogical and cultural contexts of that argument prompt a mature reconsideration of a vastly altered literary landscape. We are growing out of separate spheres; we are finding our way to an adult appreciation of complex and compelling literary and cultural meaning. Thus we see a greater number of studies that call attention to literary relationships and genre development (especially regarding periodical writing). A trend continues toward book-length works that are broader and comparative in scope: work on individual writers is most often offered in essay-length studies.

i Howells, Hopkins, and Gilman

W. D. Howells continues to receive a good deal of scholarly attention. Several essays relate specifically to A Hazard of New Fortunes, though other works attract some interest, especially in relation to Howells's realism. Cynthia Stretch in "Illusions of a Public, Locations of Conflict: Feeling Like Populace in William Dean Howells' A Hazard of New Fortunes" (ALR 35: 233–46) examines Howells's use of the 1889 New York streetcar strike for his novel. The question is how the issue affects Howells's—and Basil March's—perspective as an observer and participant in the world. Several questions arise: How might an author present/ represent "the public"? Is it possible to claim a connection to the public through economic and civic problems? How does a writer resolve aesthetic and philosophical issues? Stretch argues that Howells uses March's ambivalence and distance to explore a writer's relation to labor and working-class politics but does so by breaching the realist's status as observer. Seokwon Yang focuses on Howellsian realism in "Howells' Realism Reconsidered: Representing the Unrepresentable in A Hazard of New Fortunes" ( JELL 49: 845–70). Yang centers the novel on the debate over realism and naturalism and uses Georg Lukács and Fredric Jameson to drive the discussion. He argues that the novel is best seen within the shift toward a modern sensibility; Hazard demonstrates the chaos of urban environments and tells of attempts to constrain and recognize the chaos. The novel stands in for the whole of American society, and the main perspective presented by the Marches marks an attempt to gain aesthetic distance. Ultimately, Hazard remains within the scope of American realism, though it ultimately points to issues that naturalism adopts.

The labor crisis is central to Andrew Rennick's "'A Good War Story': The Civil War, Substitution, and the Labor Crisis in Howells' A Hazard of New Fortunes" (ALR 35: 247–61). Rennick considers whether literature may affect social change by demonstrating, through the actions of the main characters, the link between the Civil War and postwar labor issues and social dissent. The question of labor extends the Civil War within the story; class warfare is an extension of the battles of the war, seen especially through the practice of substitution and its effects and in March's disengagement. What role, if any, does literature play in the debate and class warfare? Howells's novel is a response to his own worries. In the end, any reconciliation is based not on romantic notions of reunion but on a series of challenges within the class and labor system. Gib Prettyman's "The Next Best Thing: Business and Commercial Inspiration in A Hazard of New Fortunes" (ALR 35: 95–118) considers the novel in the context of Howells's interest in contemporary utopian ideology. Prettyman suggests that the key to understanding Howells's approach is embedded in his worries over...