{"title":"Native American Realism","authors":"Lee Schweninger","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190642891.013.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190642891.013.10","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter argues that American Indian realist writings provide glimpses into cultures essentially unknown to mainstream readers of literary realism by writers outside the mainstream realist canon. It thus takes as one of its points of departure arguments for canon expansion. It also argues for widening the parameters of realism to include genres other than the novel, because so many of the writers during this era are mixed-genre writers. Basing its argument on a variety of genres, then, the chapter places several American Indian writers and their writings in social-historical contexts, such as resistance to mainstream culture, compulsory boarding school, allotment of Indian lands, coerced assimilation, and the 1890 Massacre at Wounded Knee.","PeriodicalId":326705,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism","volume":"153 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134219140","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Realism and Poetry","authors":"Jonathan N. Barron","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190642891.013.29","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190642891.013.29","url":null,"abstract":"American poetic realism still remains a largely unknown and untold story. Although it came to American poetry relatively late by comparison with fiction, the typical American realist poem has a distinctive nexus combining theme, diction, and style. Chief among the first American realists are Robert Frost, Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, and Sara Teasdale. Specifically, realist poetry expresses a pragmatic philosophy rejecting the individual’s location in the world as something knowable, fixed, and stable. Realist poets reject as amoral and quietist the commitment to beauty for the sake of beauty and tend toward virtues associated with masculinity. Their poetry rejects generic nouns in favor of particulars and depicts recognizable contemporary landscapes and, above all, contemporary American cities such as Chicago, Boston, or New York. It emphasizes the interior space of the self as revealed by the new science of psychology. It also focuses on the living idiom of talk and speech rather than a “literary” language.","PeriodicalId":326705,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133793193","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Realism and Medicine","authors":"P. Barrish","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190642891.013.26","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190642891.013.26","url":null,"abstract":"Exploring the relationship between literature and medicine, this chapter analyzes how three novels from the American realist period—Henry James’s Washington Square (1880), Sarah Orne Jewett’s A Country Doctor (1884), and Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901)—represent the medical profession during its rise to what Paul Starr has called “professional sovereignty” in the United States. Although today we may take medicine’s elite status in our society for granted, together these novels reveal that its turn-of-the-century consolidation as a profession in which society would ultimately invest unique forms of authority and prestige was anything but uncontested. Through the fictions they created, realist writers offered nuanced critical perspectives on the modes through which medicine asserted its sovereignty and also probed underlying gendered and racial tensions, even violence, that the profession’s own self-representations sought to occlude.","PeriodicalId":326705,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114256795","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Racial Realism","authors":"J. Sheffer","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190642891.013.23","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190642891.013.23","url":null,"abstract":"Realism as it has been articulated by white, middle-class literary gatekeepers since its heyday in the early twentieth century (and frequently into the present) has failed to address racism and imperialism of the era. Gene Jarrett describes black authors developing new literary forms in order “to re-create a lived or living world according to prevailing ideologies of race or racial difference.” This chapter expands Jarrett’s definition of “racial realism” beyond the black-white binary in order to show how writers of color from a variety of backgrounds crafted their own versions of realism, deploying allegory and making strategic use of stock genres such as the oriental romance and the western. For white readers in particular, these seemingly “nonrealist” plot elements provided intellectual distance from the contemporary injustices of racism in the age of US imperialism. However, for in-group readers, racial realism functioned both literally and figuratively to highlight experiences of racism and to legitimize histories too often ignored, misunderstood, or misrepresented in mainstream literary realism. Writers such as Winnifred Eaton and Mourning Dove created their own texts that were shaped by multiple literary ancestors and spoke simultaneously, though distinctly, to white readers and to their own communities of color.","PeriodicalId":326705,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115736572","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Asian American Realism","authors":"Julia H. Lee","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190642891.013.13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190642891.013.13","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter examines the use of realism in Asian American literature and the debate surrounding its political and aesthetic meanings in Asian American literary criticism. Even though realist narratives have dominated Asian American literary history, the use and significance of realism nevertheless continue to stir controversy within the field. The chapter explores both sides of the “realism controversy” within Asian American studies and makes the case that realism exposes the contradictions of Asian American identity and that Asian American identity exposes the contradictions of realism. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Hisaye Yamamoto’s short story “The Legend of Miss Sasagawara” (1950), focusing on how the author deploys a realist mode of narration to reveal the historically contingent process by which Japanese American identity and community in the internment era are constituted.","PeriodicalId":326705,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-08-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133428599","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}