Realism as Modernism

Abstract

American realism and modernism were coevolving literary movements with roots in the second half of the nineteenth century. The critical reluctance to recognize this fact and the recasting of realism in pejorative terms were shaped by the emergence of the romance theory of the American novel in the 1920s. A wide variety of modern artists were active in the United States in the 1890s. They were especially visible in the period’s little magazines, known as “ephemeral bibelots.” The fad for these magazines was international and expressly antirealist. Concurrently, American realist writing consistently framed “new” and “modern” art as being foreign in content and style.