Realism after the Individual: Women, Desire, and the Modern American Novel

A study of the transformation of the realist novel in the hands of early-twentieth-century American writers, who adapted this quintessentially nineteenth-century genre to the conditions of their age.

Realism after the Individual offers a new theoretical paradigm for understanding realist novels published in the United States between 1900 and 1920, a period that has been described wrongheadedly as a “gulf” or a “valley” in American literary history. In this generation of writers, only three...