A Companion to American Fiction, 1865 - 1914

"All praise to Lamb and Thompson Comprehensive, well written and carefully edited ... Essential." Choice "The editors have intended the Companion to be an introduction to the field and a reference tool for 'advanced undergraduates, graduate students, faculty members and general intellectuals'. In this they have succeeded admirably." Reference Reviews

Robert Paul Lamb is Associate Professor of English at Purdue University. The author of many articles on American literature and recipient of Harvard Universitys Bowdoin Prize for scholarship, his teaching honors include Harvards Stephen J. Botein Prize, Purdues University Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching, Purdues Liberal Arts Departmental Award for Educational Excellence, and induction into The Purdue Book of Great Teachers. G.R. Thompson is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Purdue University. His previous publications include the Norton Critical Edition of Edgar Allan Poe (2004), Neutral Ground: New Traditionalism and the American Romance Controversy (1999), The Art of Authorial Presence: Hawthornes Provincial Tales (1993), Essays and Reviews ofEdgar Allan Poe (1984), Ruined Eden of the Present: Hawthorne, Melville and Poe (1981) and Poes Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (1973).

List of Illustrations x Notes on Contributors xi Acknowledgments xviii Editors' Introduction 1 Robert Paul Lamb and G. R. Thompson PART I Historical Traditions and Genres 13 1 The Practice and Promotion of American Literary Realism 15 Nancy Glazener 2 Excitement and Consciousness in the Romance Tradition 35 William J. Scheick 3 The Sentimental and Domestic Traditions, 18651900 53 Gregg Camfield 4 Morality, Modernity, and "Malarial Restlessness": American Realism in its Anglo-European Contexts 77 Winfried Fluck 5 American Literary Naturalism 96 Christophe Den Tandt 6 American Regionalism: Local Color, National Literature, Global Circuits 119 June Howard 7 Women Authors and the Roots of American Modernism 140 Linda Wagner-Martin 8 The Short Story and the Short-Story Sequence, 18651914 149 J. Gerald Kennedy PART II Contexts and Themes 175 9 Ecological Narrative and Nature Writing 177 S. K. Robisch 10 "The Frontier Story": The Violence of Literary History 201 Christine Bold 11 Native American Narratives: Resistance and Survivance 222 Gerald Vizenor 12 Representing the Civil War and Reconstruction: From Uncle Tom to Uncle Remus 240 Kathleen Diffley 13 Engendering the Canon: Women's Narratives, 18651914 260 Grace Farrell 14 Confronting the Crisis: African American Narratives 279 Dickson D. Bruce, Jr. 15 Fiction's Many Cities 296 Sidney H. Bremer 16 Mapping the Culture of Abundance: Literary Narratives and Consumer Culture 318 Sarah Way Sherman 17 Secrets of the Master's Deed Box: Narrative and Class 340 Christopher P. Wilson 18 Ethnic Realism 356 Robert M. Dowling 19 Darwin, Science, and Narrative 377 Bert Bender 20 Writing in the "Vulgar Tongue": Law and American Narrative 395 William E. Moddelmog 21 Planning Utopia 411 Thomas Peyser 22 American Children's Narrative as Social Criticism, 18651914 428 Gwen Athene Tarbox PART III Major Authors 449 23 An Idea of Order at Concord: Soul and Society in the Mind of Louisa May Alcott 451 John Matteson 24 America Can Break Your Heart: On the Significance of Mark Twain 468 Robert Paul Lamb 25 William Dean Howells and the Bourgeois Quotidian: Affection, Skepticism, Disillusion 499 Michael Anesko 26 Henry James in a New Century 518 John Carlos Rowe 27 Toward a Modernist Aesthetic: The Literary Legacy of Edith Wharton 536 Candace Waid and Clare Colquitt 28 Sensations of Style: The Literary Realism of Stephen Crane 557 William E. Cain 29 Theodore Dreiser and the Force of the Personal 572 Clare Virginia Eby Index 587