With social and political issues providing the foreground of
literary studies over the past several years, William Dean Howells
has re-emerged as a major author. Yet, among canonical American
writers, Howells simultaneously attracts both significant attention
and curious neglect. While studies devoted to his novels, The Rise
of Silas Lapham and A Hazard of New Fortunes, are proliferating,
the attention paid to his later writing, particularly his short
fiction, is not only far less sustained but often dismissive,
promoting a continuous inattention to the process by which the
author discovers new forms and expression. William Dean Howells and
the American Memory Crisis confronts the frequent refusal to see
Howells as a writer whose lifelong engagement with literature
pushed him through generic boundaries in search of new ways of
shaping his fiction and questioning American identity. By focusing
on Howellss preoccupation with tropes of memory and amnesia, this
book positions his work within the American memory crisis, the
turn-of-the-centurys pervasive feelings of fragmentation, loss, and
dislocation that followed breathtaking transformations in the pace
of everyday life and traditional social structures, which
contributed to the sense that the linear inheritance of the past
was severely weakened, if not broken beyond repair. As Americans
engaged in a politics of memorywith various groups battling for
their stake in shaping Americas present and future by defining its
pastHowellss work interacts with a number of social discourses and
practices through which national identity was being (re)constructed
and debated. The book explores these sites of memory, including
historiography, therhetoric of imperialism, the revival in
historical romantic fiction, the rise of photography, the boom in
monument construction, the beginnings of modern advertising, the
interest in spiritualism and the occult, and literary history
itself. By focusing on two neglected areas of Howells studieshis
late short fiction and his engagement in the politics of
memoryWilliam Dean Howells and the American Memory Crisis clarifies
the convergence of his aesthetic and political goals and challenges
recent innovative studies that situate Howells and literary realism
as reinforcing late-nineteenth-century hierarchies of race, class,
and gender. As a major figure of the traditional canon, Howells
routinely has been positioned as a powerful cultural authority who
was either deceptive of his real goals, willfully hypocritical, or
ignorant of the actual political scene in which he was working.
Rubins book complicates some of these accepted views by arguing
that, while not apolitical, Howells was not as nave or as
reactionary as some have claimed. By not accounting for the
direction Howells takes in his later work, particularly as it
imagines and represents memory, previous studiesso reliant on
postmodern-influenced criticism seem to have often overlooked
Howellss own postmodern leanings. Tropes of memory and amnesia have
become prominent in postmodern theories of history and
subjectivity, registering anxiety about the stability of the self
and serving as metaphors for the impossibility of objective and
secure historical narratives. Howellss work, this book maintains,
consistently gestures toward these and other characteristics of the
postmodern in its approach to history and questions the versions
ofliterary realism that have become sacrosanct within the academy.
Ultimately, this book provides other teachers, researchers, and
students with a new framework with which to approach Howells and
American realism. As his discussion draws on a variety of discourse
in its exploration of Americas politics of memory, a secondary,
more interdisciplinary audience includes those interested in
political and social theory, history, and cultural studies. This is
an important book for scholars, students, and te
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