Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Chapter 2 The short story as ironic myth: Washington Irving and William Austin
- Chapter 3 Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Chapter 4 Edgar Allan Poe
- Chapter 5 Herman Melville
- Chapter 6 New territories: Bret Harte and Mark Twain
- Chapter 7 Realism, the grotesque and impressionism: Hamlin Garland, Ambrose Bierce and Stephen Crane
- Chapter 8 Henry James
- Chapter 9 Rebecca Harding Davis, Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman
- Chapter 10 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather
- Chapter 11 Growth, fragmentation, new aesthetics and new voices in the early twentieth century
- Chapter 12 O. Henry and Jack London
- Chapter 13 Sherwood Anderson
- Chapter 14 Ernest Hemingway
- Chapter 15 F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Chapter 16 William Faulkner
- Chapter 17 Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor
- Chapter 18 Charles Chesnutt, Richard Wright, James Baldwin and the African American short story to 1965
- Chapter 19 Aspects of the American short story 1930–1980
- Chapter 20 Two traditions and the changing idea of the mainstream
- Chapter 21 The postmodern short story in America
- Chapter 22 Raymond Carver
- Chapter 23 Epilogue: the contemporary American short story
- Notes
- Guide to further reading
- Index
Chapter 7 - Realism, the grotesque and impressionism: Hamlin Garland, Ambrose Bierce and Stephen Crane
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Chapter 2 The short story as ironic myth: Washington Irving and William Austin
- Chapter 3 Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Chapter 4 Edgar Allan Poe
- Chapter 5 Herman Melville
- Chapter 6 New territories: Bret Harte and Mark Twain
- Chapter 7 Realism, the grotesque and impressionism: Hamlin Garland, Ambrose Bierce and Stephen Crane
- Chapter 8 Henry James
- Chapter 9 Rebecca Harding Davis, Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman
- Chapter 10 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather
- Chapter 11 Growth, fragmentation, new aesthetics and new voices in the early twentieth century
- Chapter 12 O. Henry and Jack London
- Chapter 13 Sherwood Anderson
- Chapter 14 Ernest Hemingway
- Chapter 15 F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Chapter 16 William Faulkner
- Chapter 17 Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor
- Chapter 18 Charles Chesnutt, Richard Wright, James Baldwin and the African American short story to 1965
- Chapter 19 Aspects of the American short story 1930–1980
- Chapter 20 Two traditions and the changing idea of the mainstream
- Chapter 21 The postmodern short story in America
- Chapter 22 Raymond Carver
- Chapter 23 Epilogue: the contemporary American short story
- Notes
- Guide to further reading
- Index
Summary
William Dean Howells, realism and Hamlin Garland
William Dean Howells, novelist, short story writer, editor of the prestigious Atlantic Monthly from 1871 to 1881 and one of the most influential critics of the period, was a significant influence in the movement towards literary realism towards the end of the nineteenth century, and in his critical advocacy of the short story form. In ‘The Editor's Study’ (1887) he wrote of ‘the foolish old superstition that literature and art are anything but the expression of life, and are to be judged by any other test than that of their fidelity to it’. Howells's own best short story, ‘Editha’ (1905), is a sharply anti-idealistic story about war and conceptions of honour. In Criticism and Fiction (1891) he also advances the possibility that American writers in particular have ‘brought the short story nearer perfection in the all-round sense than almost any other people’ and ranks them only below Russian writers. And he singles out innovations of language, particularly the use of dialect, as among the writers' primary means for re-invigorating literature. American writers, he says, should ‘go into the shops and fields’ for their subjects and language, and ‘when their characters speak, I should like to hear them speak true American, with all the varying Tennessean, Philadelphian, Bostonian and New York accents’. And the ultimate motivation for this movement was democratic: ‘The arts must become democratic, and then we shall have the expression of America in art.
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- The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story , pp. 65 - 77Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006