American Realism | Phillip Barrish (essay date 2001)
Phillip Barrish (essay date 2001)
SOURCE: Barrish, Phillip. “William Dean Howells and the Roots of Realist Taste.” In American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige, 1880-1995, pp. 16-47. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
[In the following essay, Barrish discusses the manner in which Howells's fiction contributed to the development of the realist aesthetic.]
REALIST TASTE VERSUS PHILISTINISM
In the course of well-known critic James Cox's contribution to a 1991 collection of New Essays on The Rise of Silas Lapham, he makes a more-or-less parenthetic remark about the vernacular aspect of the book's protagonist: “Indeed there has always been a sense among cultivated readers of dialect that Lapham, in his swagger as well as in his speech rhythms, actually seems more Western than Northeastern.”1 While I do not wish to enter into the question of Western versus Northeastern...
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