Late-19th-Century Literature

Literary critics have increasingly employed archaeological methods, discovering or rediscovering buried artifacts that shed light on past cultural practices and on current social issues. This focus on lesser-known works and neglected authors reveals a shifting literary canon that highlights current concerns. Although aesthetic, rhetorical, and structural analyses continue to serve as a methodology, art for art's sake has taken a backseat to art as cultural artifact, whether the artifact be an unfamiliar poem or a once popular novel. Nowhere is this trend more obvious than in the field of African American literature, but even in the examination of realists and naturalists, we find a focus on neglected authors and forgotten works. In this recovery of overlooked texts, there is an emphasis not only on lesser-known compositions but also on why the compositions have been neglected. As the subject of more scholar studies than any other author of the period, Charlotte Perkins Gilman is the late-19th-century author of the year, a fact that further exemplifies the shifting canon.

i Realists and Naturalists

Three scholarly studies examine late-19th-century realism and naturalism as movements. In American Realist Fictions of Marriage Kelli V. Randall analyzes both canonical and noncanonical works by pairing novels: Emma Dunham Kelley's Megda and Kate Chopin's The Awakening, Frances Harper's Iola Leroy and W. D. Howells's An Imperative Duty, Pauline Hopkins's Contending Forces and Wharton's The House of Mirth. In these comparative studies, Randall focuses on representations of marriage showing how the institution could overcome social problems—racism, sexism, and economic inequality—but also how marriage reveals inequities. Similarly, Edward Morgan Day Frank's "Interest, Disgust" (Novel 50: 197–216) develops a fascinating argument that connects late-19th- and early -20th-century literature (Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Wharton, Thorstein Veblen) to university curricula, finding that institutions of higher learning defined themselves by excluding the "disgusting" elements of society but maintained student interest by recovering those disgusting elements in realistic literature, such as Norris's McTeague.

Finally, in the most significant contribution to the field, Monika Elbert and Wendy Ryden's Haunting Realities: Naturalist Gothic and American Realism (Alabama) presents essays that expand our definitions of realism and naturalism by focusing on tensions between the real and the gothic. The chapters are arranged thematically under five topics. The first four focus on gender: Stephen Arch's "Seeing Gothically: Elizabeth Stoddard's The Morgesons" (pp. 17–30) argues that Stoddard employed the domestic gothic to question gender roles in ways that anticipate naturalism; Wendy Ryden's "Matrimonial Abjections: The Slave Marriage and Charles W. Chesnutt's Legal Gothic" (pp. 31–44) focuses on Chesnutt's short fiction, employing the gothic to question domestic relationships; David Greven's "Iterated Horrors: 'The Monster' and Manhood" (pp. 45–58) analyzes the gothic in Crane, focusing on the undermining of black masculinity after Reconstruction; and Donna M. Campbell's "The Victim as Vampire: Gothic Naturalism in the White Slave Narrative" (pp. 59–72) compares Norris's "The Third Circle" and Elizabeth Robins's My Little Sister, finding prostitutes depicted as vampires and victims. Focusing on war, the second section includes Monika Elbert's "Domestic Gothic in the Civil War Fiction of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (Ward) and Ambrose Bierce" (pp. 75–89), which argues that maternal sentimentalism remains, despite the determinism of naturalism; Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet's "'His Face Ceased Instantly to Be a Face': Gothicism in Stephen Crane" (pp. 90–102), which finds gothic tropes, such as faceless humans, in "The Monster" and The Red Badge of Courage, images that support a martial attitude; and Steve Marsden's "Unmasking the Lynching Subject: Thomas Nelson Page, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and the Specters of American Race" (pp. 103–16), which looks at Dunbar's "Lynching of Jube Benson" as a response to Page. In section 3, Elbert and Ryden gather essays about "wicked" money: Dara Downey's "Dangerous Houses in the Uncanny Tales of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Mary E. Wilkins" (pp. 119–31) presents characters victimized by haunted houses; and Christine A. Wooley's "Haunted Economies: Race, Retribution, and Money in Pauline...