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“The Knowledge of the Line”: Realism and the City in Howells's A Hazard of New Fortunes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Amy Kaplan
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Abstract

Realism in Howells's A Hazard of New Fortunes is a process of imagining and managing the threat of social change identified with urban life in late nineteenth-century American culture. As a narrative of settlement, it seeks to establish a knowable community and to control a foreign and unreal territory. The strategies for representing the city are generated in an introductory scene in which the main characters look for an apartment. The narrative progresses through an escalating struggle between conflicting trajectories in realism—coherence and fragmentation, containment and excess—that explode in the pivotal streetcar strike. The novel ends with the impossibility of closure, at the limits of Howells's theory of realism.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 101 , Issue 1 , January 1986 , pp. 69 - 81
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1986

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