American Realism and the Canon

This collection of twelve essays focuses on a variety of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century texts to illustrate the unprecedented flexibility of the realist mode in American fiction and poetry. As the volume demonstrates, the realist era was hospitable to a multitude of writers - including Mark Twain, W. D. Howells, and Bret Harte, as well as such newly canonized figures as Marietta Holly, Abraham Cahan, Frances Ellen Harper, Sui Sin Far, and Zitkala-Sa - who voiced the most urgent concerns of race and ethnicity, gender, class, and region. In all, these essays not only participate in the ongoing recanonization of American literature but reconstruct the literary history of the period by raising theoretical questions, addressing social and ideological issues, and revaluing literary tradition.