Kill Fee

Over at Slate, Jess Row looks at Ben Marcus’s recent essay in Harper’s, “Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It.” Of realist vs. experimental writing, Row writes:

These days few writers would self-consciously place themselves firmly on one or the other side of these boundaries. Living, as we do, in the wake of a century that celebrated, even fetishized, novelty and growth, we need a more nuanced way of articulating our relationship with the past.

And, over at the London Review of Books, Amanda Claybaugh reviews the William Dean Howells biography by Susan Goodman and Charles Dawson. Of the past, Claybaugh writes:

Howells championed this mix of authors [Henry James, Mark Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton, Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Abraham Cahan, and others] in the name of a single cause: literary realism. It is difficult to imagine a definition of realism capacious enough to embrace James, Twain and Cahan, but Howells applied the term “realist” to them all. Goodman and Dawson argue that “realism” was simply Howells’s name for writing he liked. But even if his critical writings don’t associate realism with a specific set of novelistic practices, they do associate it with an aggressive stance towards existing models. Like Cervantes, Howells thought of realism as the perpetual unmasking of literary convention, the continual reinvention of literary codes. He celebrated as realist anything new, whether it was James’s truncated endings, Twain’s use of dialect or Cahan’s use of fables. And he was similarly obliged to attack as anti-realist everything old. His usual generosity to other writers failed him when he was fighting what he called “the realism war,” and he confessed, a few months after beginning to write his essays for Harper’s, to his great enjoyment in “banging the babes of Romance about.”

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