13 19th-Century Literature

We would do well to understand that our work stands on the shoulders of those who cherished curiosity and valued paradigm shifts as more than opportunities for career advancement. In his preface to The American Adam (1955) R. W. B. Lewis set the parameters for a definition of literary history and a concept of culture that is still functional and useful: "culture achieves identity not so much through the ascendancy of one particular set of convictions as through the emergence of its peculiar and distinctive dialogue. . . . Intellectual history, properly conducted, exposes not only the dominant ideas of a period, or a nation, but more important, the dominant clashes over ideas." Lewis understood that the participants in that debate change with time but that debate remains primary. The idea of culture as intellectual conflict has a long history, including among the 19th-century participants Emerson, Margaret Fuller, John Stuart Mill, and Matthew Arnold. If anything, this year's scholarship continues that debate energetically and on multiple levels. The "dominant clashes" over ideas in great measure have become not only the way we define culture broadly but also the way we position ourselves against an established tradition of literary analysis and, in some instances, the way we question the very meaning and worth of what we do when we read and study American literature. No camp, no methodology dominates.

The work reviewed here focuses on single writers and on clusters of writers; it marks new approaches to established figures as well as to those recently canonized; it uses established forms of literary analysis to introduce hitherto unrecognized writers; it offers insight into aesthetics at the same time it challenges us to see the complicated intersection of gender, race, and class in a cultural clash that results in literary and literal casualties. We find new things to read and new ways to read them. And all of this raises the stakes of scholarly discourse because it increases the expectations on that discourse. The debate continues not in a tangle of broken worldviews but as an intricate brocade that makes the everyday more intriguing and the inspired more stunning. The frontier metaphor continues to influence discussion of late-19th-century American literature not only because it identifies a site for grand notions of conquest but also because it signifies local concerns with living in the midst of heterogeneous populations and competing values.

i William Dean Howells, Charles Chesnutt, and Bret Harte

Augusta Rohrbach's "'You're a Natural-Born Literary Man': Becoming William Dean Howells, Culture Maker and Cultural Marker" (NEQ 73: 625–53) focuses attention on Howells's keen awareness of his place within a volatile literary market and the influence of the market on the visual image of the author. Howells like his friend Mark Twain understood the needs and wants of readers and the ways he could literally shape a public presentation to meet those needs. Rohrbach traces the public image—Howells with and without his famous mustache—in photographs spanning a career in Boston and New York, and links the image to the place and the position Howells sought to occupy in the public eye. The market is also the main topic of Christopher Diller's "'Fiction in Color': Domesticity, Aestheticism, and the Visual Arts in the Criticism and Fiction of William Dean Howells" (NCF 55: 369–98). Here the discussion revolves around Howells's notion of art (in The Coast of Bohemia and A Hazard of New Fortunes) as both aesthetic creation and marketable object; ultimately, the issue is Howells's development of a theory of art consistent with the ideology of Realism. According to Diller, Howells used his fiction to work out the technical, aesthetic, and ethical features of art. That his solution involved blending the cultural and the fictional suggests in turn an implicit hierarchy of values in his thought growing out of the intersection of gender and aesthetics.

While aesthetics may be seen as inhabiting a higher, perhaps less sympathetic plane, Carrie Tirado Bramen's "William Dean Howells and the Failure of the Urban Picturesque" (NEQ 73: 82–99) challenges a reading of Howells as distanced...