In this volume, Professor David Shi, president of Furman University and former Frontis W. Johnson Professor of History at Davidson College, offers “a synthetic overview of the major events, ideas, and individuals that combined to generate the various types of ‘realistic’expression and determine their fate in the marketplace of taste between the mid-nineteenth century and the end of World War I.” Shi disclaims any intention of offering a “startling new thesis about realism as a conceptual or aesthetic category.” This is perhaps too modest, for his aims are far more ambitious than he pretends, and the product of his labors more impressive. What he has, in fact, attempted is to abstract a comprehensive meaning from a concept that is so protean one wonders if it is susceptible to definition. The meaning of realism changes shape as it moves across disciplinary lines, adjusting to the needs of “various realistic sensibilities in the natural and social sciences, philosophy, literature, art and architecture.” In his efforts to discover and identify the overarching unities that might be assumed to exist between the various definitions and manifestations of realism, Shi worked with prodigious amounts of primary and secondary material. This study benefited, and rightly so, from several research grants, but it clearly could not have been produced within the confines of a mere research project; it is the product of many years of reading, reflection, and teaching.

Shi does not assert that realism was always a conscious ideology or cultural style. Indeed, some of the figures he describes used the term seldom or not at all, and were unaware of being realists until critics identified them as such. Nonetheless, realism seemed to be an ideological assumption underlying much of what some artists and intellectuals of the period attempted to accomplish. They were uniformly in rebellion against antebellum romanticism and idealism, and assumed that a world of objective truth existed independently from the mind. Realism was already collapsing at its hour of triumph in the 1890s. Shi argues, as pragmatism, relativism, and the Freudian view of consciousness began to assert influences on the thinking of intellectual elites. In his treatments of Henry and William James, Shi illustrates how “reality” came to be conceived as a function of “mind” by the beginning of this century. Shi is to be commended for a style uncontaminated by postmodernist jargon. This validates his claim that his intention was to reach students and the general reader, although he is more likely to appeal to scholars. Few general readers will be familiar with the novels of Charles Chesnutt, Hamlin Garland, Robert Herrick, or even William Dean Howells and Edith Wharton. Sadly, there are few college graduates with sufficient exposure to the histories of literature, the arts, and the sciences to appreciate most of Shi’s allusions. A fine undergraduate seminar could be founded on this work, but not a large lecture course. The typical second-year graduate assistant would have difficulty leading discussion sections based on such a volume, which lightly touches on such a broad range of topics. Only a teacher as experienced and erudite as the author, working with students slightly above the mode, could fully exploit this work’s potential as a teaching text.