Writing Realism: Howells, James, and Norris in the Mass Market

In this powerful literary history, Daniel Borus traces the social and economic conditions that helped to produce American realism. Analyzing publishing records, personal correspondence, and essays by William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Frank Norris, Borus explores the connection between the changing process of authorship and the formal properties of realism.

Rather than treat literature as an autonomous formal discourse, Borus concentrates on the concrete practice of writing a novel for sale to anonymous consumers whose tastes and character are not personally or directly known by the author. The dramatic changes in the book market of the late nineteenth century -- in such matters as royalties, literary syndicates, agents, publicity, and authors' organizations -- required a redefinition of what a novel was, how it was written, on what basis the author engaged the audience, and what social role the author could play.

Borus identifies the characteristic elements of realism as nonintervening narration, concrete language designed to match word with thing, "typical" subject matter, and political reformism. He maintains that these elements were solutions to problems that the realists faced under the new conditions created by the mass market.

For example, realists rejected the concept of inspiration from a foreign muse, describing their process as "work," the diligent application of observation. But this emphasis presented them with a contradiction: how were they to signify that work had been done, yet offer a text that appeared natural and given? The solution was omniscient narration, the characteristic form of realism in which the narrator is nowhere present yet still controls the flow of events and observation.

The writers' solutions often compounded the problems they were attempting to overcome in their new fiction. In the end, Borus says, the realists' inability to free themselves fully from market conceptions of writing and social function limited the success of their search for uncommodified communication and resulted in texts informed by contradictory impulses. Borus's analysis offers new insights into both the achievements and failures of American realism.

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