Overview

Applies new understandings of realism as a political aesthetic to Progressive Era Literature, arguing for its radicalism politically and culturally Offers an original interpretation of the contribution of American anthropology and social science to the development of literature and culture in the 20th century New readings of canonical and non-canonical texts of the period 1880 1930, placing Edith Wharton, WD Howells, Stephen Crane Jose Mart and others alongside works by other working-class reformers, journalists, political radicals and anthropologists working in the Progressive Era U.S.A. New approach to realism that explores it as a form of modernism in the arts Develops a theory of the intersections of class and culture in U.S. literature that contributes to ongoing discussions in the method wars This book is an account of how American realism in the Progressive Era contributed to debates about modernity. It uses the anthropological theories of Franz Boas, and Jacques Ranciere's work on aesthetics and politics to develop a mode of reading class and culture that challenges conventional interpretations that pit the two modes of representation in opposition. It paints a picture of the late-nineteenth century, prior to modernism, as an aesthetically exciting, original, and politically radical stage in American life to reinvigorate realism as a radical aesthetic practice, with implications for understandings of American literature both in the past and into the future.

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9781474456722

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Collins takes his place alongside Amy Kaplan and Walter Benn Michaels as an essential critic of turn-of-the-century American culture. A crucial contribution to studies of race, class, and temporality, this book recaptures the pluralist potentiality of American realism by offering a new literary history of everyday life. A tremendous achievement.--Gavin Jones, Stanford University

Author Information

Michael J. Collins (he/him) is Reader in American Studies at King's College London where he is Deputy Head of School, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts. Recent essays on Mark Twain, Claude McKay and W.E.B DuBois have appeared in Textual Practice, English Language Notes and The Palgrave Handbook to Twentieth Century Literature and Science (ed. Priscilla Wald), respectively. He is the author of The Drama of the American Short Story, 1800- 1865 (2016) and is co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story with Prof Gavin Jones. He has been the recipient of Arts and Humanities Research Council awards at Masters, Doctoral and Postdoctoral level and a Leverhulme Early Career award.

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