Although realism and naturalism could have sprung up independently in the United States, the historical fact is that they flourished earlier in the European countries all the way eastward to Russia and that American writers were especially stimulated by British and French models. On the other hand, though a still provincial, moralizing culture might have rejected realism and naturalism as alien or profane or harmful, nevertheless they did become established in the postbellum United States. Even Richard Chase, whose The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957) had argued that the romance was the quintessential mode of fiction in the United States, felt compelled to declare: 'After all, realism, although it was there from the beginning, did “rise,” or at least became conscious of itself as a significant, liberalizing and forwardlooking literary program. Whole areas of the American novel, both classic and modern, are closed to any reader who . . . thinks that it contains no meaningful element of realism.'