Late-19th-Century Literature

Two major biographies, a new journal, and an ever-increasing interest in the various ways in which writers made use of the idea of realism set the tone for scholarship this year. The breadth and complexity of African American literature is also highly visible, both in its relation to the period’s more dominant ideologies, usually represented by W. D. Howells, and on its own terms. Of course, the impact of Howells as both an artist and a critic also continues to attract attention, while interest in Stephen Crane appears, for the moment, to be picking up, too. Finally, the year’s scholarship evinces significant concentration on the effects of popular forms of literature and of widely distributed modes of publication, particularly in relation to women authors, and the American West proves to be a more prominent theme than in the recent past.

i Naturalism

In the works for over thirty years, Joseph R. McElrath and Jesse S. Crisler’s Frank Norris: A Life (Illinois) presents a long-overdue, definitive biography of the man who was arguably American literary naturalism’s most dedicated advocate and practitioner. More than just an account of a life spent writing, this impressive book provides a portrait of both the artist and the period in which he lived. This double perspective is largely due to the authors’ extensive research into materials that previous biographers had only briefly consulted, if at all, particularly the diaries and memoirs of those who knew Norris and the massive periodical archives now made accessible through microform. With their hard-won and unexpectedly vast trove of material McElrath and Crisler offer a critical interpretation of two parallel tracks of Norris’s reputation: that of his work and reception as a conventional writer and that of his work as an iconoclast. Of particular note is the fact that fully half of the book deals with important biographical and critical matters that antedate the publication of Norris’s first novel. Ranging from his time as a student at Berkeley and Harvard to his journalistic dispatches from South Africa, Cuba, and San Francisco, the first half of the biography demonstrates admirably the historical forces at work on a writer who could capably translate into words what he experienced. And the detailed discussion of the period during which Norris’s major works appeared with amazing speed (1898 to 1902) makes for compelling and informative reading as well. With this study it is no longer possible to lament the absence of an authoritative and engaging scholarly biography of Frank Norris.

Two analyses of Norris’s fiction also merit notice. In Imagining the Primitive in Naturalist and Modernist Literature Gina M. Rossetti examines the works of a number of naturalist authors to demonstrate the genre’s engagement with nativist philosophy, most evident in its conceptions of the primitive. In addition to a chapter that reprints a previously reviewed essay on McTeague (see AmLS 2004, p. 286), this book also includes a separate chapter that looks in part at Vandover and the Brute. Whereas the former novel, according to Rossetti, demonstrates Norris’s figuration of fear of the immigrant, the latter investigates the genre’s use of the primitive as central to the promotion of a “robust American identity.” Looking at identity of a different sort, Denise Cruz’s “Reconsidering McTeague’s ‘Mark’ and ‘Mac’: Intersections of U.S. Naturalism, Imperial Masculinities, and Desire Between Men” (AL 78: 487–517) acknowledges Norris’s explicit assertion that the sexual relationship between a man and a woman was a dangerous topic for literature but argues that Norris was just as concerned about “male-male desire that goes beyond the type of effeminate invert or homosexual.” Cruz finds that this idea signifies a “much more insidious” relationship in Norris’s thinking, which in turn prompts for her a reevaluation of an association of naturalism with hypermasculinity. She suggests instead that the genre may usefully be understood as concerned with a broad range of gender relationships and identities.

As one might expect, Norris appears among the authors covered in the inaugural double issue of Studies in American Naturalism (1, i–ii), a...