Abstract:Much of the modern disappointment with William Dean Howells' work grows from a failure to understand his aims. This misunderstanding arises partly because his literary rationale was far from being as ...Much of the modern disappointment with William Dean Howells' work grows from a failure to understand his aims. This misunderstanding arises partly because his literary rationale was far from being as systematic and uncompromising as has often been assumed; close study of the entire body of his critical essays and reviews shows that he did not reject all fiction which departed from a circumstantial fidelity to life. In essence, Howells felt that authenticity concerning human character was the touchstone of great art and that problems of method were secondary. Although he condemned most non-realistic fiction as untrue and therefore finally vicious morally, he was willing to allow imaginative play in that writing which did no harm or which, better still, aimed at faithfulness to the inner verity of existence. Howells, like Hawthorne and many other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers, distinguished between the realistic novel and the prose “romance,” and he of course generally preferred to write the realistic novel. But, instead of being “unsympathetic to books of romance” or harboring a “suspicion of all romantic tendencies including his own,” he also accepted the romance as an estimable genre of fiction.Read More
Publication Year: 1952
Publication Date: 1952-03-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot