Biographical narratives typically have been constructed according to a standard format, a chronicle from cradle to grave. In contrast, autobiographical narratives have been less formulaic or more experimental, taking multiple forms. The earliest biographies were intended to glorify the lives… Read More ›
Throughout his career as a fiction writer, William Dean Howells worked against the sentimentality and idealization that pervaded popular American literature in the nineteenth century. He pleaded for characters, situations, behavior, values, settings, and even speech patterns that were true… Read More ›
Realism was by no means a uniform or coherent movement; a tendency toward realism arose in many parts of Europe and in America, beginning in the 1840s. The major figures included Flaubert and Balzac in France, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy… Read More ›
Though Henry James (1843–1916) was an American novelist, he saw the word “American” as embracing a certain cultural openness, or in his words, a “fusion and synthesis of the various National tendencies of the world.”1 The experience underlying James’ creative… Read More ›
Regarded by many as the major American novelist and critic of his age, William Dean Howells (1837–1920) began his career as a printer and journalist. He became sub-editor and then chief editor of the most prestigious journal on the East… Read More ›
Twentieth-century literary criticism and theory has comprised a broad range of tendencies and movements: a humanistic tradition, descended from nineteenth-century writers such as Matthew Arnold and continued into the twentieth century through figures such as Irving Babbitt and F. R…. Read More ›
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