The Ferment of Realism

This book traces the central developments in American literature between and 1919. It opens with an account of the consolidation of realism as the dominant standard of critical value and brings the reader forward to the moment at the end of World War I when American writers began to take a recognized place among the masters of literary modernism. The ascendancy of the novel as the principal genre of the realists is presented against a broader cultural and historical background. Professor Berthoff reviews and evaluates American fiction from the time when Howells Twain and Henry James were still under attack by old-school idealizers to the emergence of a new critical and testamentary realism with Crane Dreiser and Gertrude Stein. He shows how the writers under discussion reacted to the work of their predecessors and contemporaries to foreign literary currents innovations in journalism contemporary events and to changing mores. Using specific examples and direct quotations Professor Berthoff appraises the strengths and limitations of each. All his discussions even of secondary writers are rounded out with a wide range of critical opinion.