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<p>List of Illustrations x</p> <p>Notes on Contributors xi</p> <p>Acknowledgments xviii</p> <p>Editors' Introduction 1<br /> <i>Robert Paul Lamb and G. R. Thompson</i></p> <p><b>PART I</b> <b>Historical Traditions and Genres</b> <b>13</b></p> <p>1 The Practice and Promotion of American Literary Realism 15<br /> <i>Nancy Glazener</i></p> <p>2 Excitement and Consciousness in the Romance Tradition 35<br /> <i>William J. Scheick</i></p> <p>3 The Sentimental and Domestic Traditions, 1865–1900 53<br /> <i>Gregg Camfield</i></p> <p>4 Morality, Modernity, and "Malarial Restlessness": American Realism in its Anglo-European Contexts 77<br /> <i>Winfried Fluck</i></p> <p>5 American Literary Naturalism 96<br /> <i>Christophe Den Tandt</i></p> <p>6 American Regionalism: Local Color, National Literature, Global Circuits 119<br /> <i>June Howard</i></p> <p>7 Women Authors and the Roots of American Modernism 140<br /> <i>Linda Wagner-Martin</i></p> <p>8 The Short Story and the Short-Story Sequence, 1865–1914 149<br /> <i>J. Gerald Kennedy</i></p> <p><b>PART II</b> <b>Contexts and Themes</b> <b>175</b></p> <p>9 Ecological Narrative and Nature Writing 177<br /> <i>S. K. Robisch</i></p> <p>10 "The Frontier Story": The Violence of Literary History 201<br /> <i>Christine Bold</i></p> <p>11 Native American Narratives: Resistance and Survivance 222<br /> <i>Gerald Vizenor</i></p> <p>12 Representing the Civil War and Reconstruction: From Uncle Tom to Uncle Remus 240<br /> <i>Kathleen Diffley</i></p> <p>13 Engendering the Canon: Women's Narratives, 1865–1914 260<br /> <i>Grace Farrell</i></p> <p>14 Confronting the Crisis: African American Narratives 279<br /> <i>Dickson D. Bruce, Jr.</i></p> <p>15 Fiction's Many Cities 296<br /> <i>Sidney H. Bremer</i></p> <p>16 Mapping the Culture of Abundance: Literary Narratives and Consumer Culture 318<br /> <i>Sarah Way Sherman</i></p> <p>17 Secrets of the Master's Deed Box: Narrative and Class 340<br /> <i>Christopher P. Wilson</i></p> <p>18 Ethnic Realism 356<br /> <i>Robert M. Dowling</i></p> <p>19 Darwin, Science, and Narrative 377<br /> <i>Bert Bender</i></p> <p>20 Writing in the "Vulgar Tongue": Law and American Narrative 395<br /> <i>William E. Moddelmog</i></p> <p>21 Planning Utopia 411<br /> <i>Thomas Peyser</i></p> <p>22 American Children's Narrative as Social Criticism, 1865–1914 428<br /> <i>Gwen Athene Tarbox</i></p> <p><b>PART III</b> <b>Major Authors</b> <b>449</b></p> <p>23 An Idea of Order at Concord: Soul and Society in the Mind of Louisa May Alcott 451<br /> <i>John Matteson</i></p> <p>24 America Can Break Your Heart: On the Significance of Mark Twain 468<br /> <i>Robert Paul Lamb</i></p> <p>25 William Dean Howells and the Bourgeois Quotidian: Affection, Skepticism, Disillusion 499<br /> <i>Michael Anesko</i></p> <p>26 Henry James in a New Century 518<br /> <i>John Carlos Rowe</i></p> <p>27 Toward a Modernist Aesthetic: The Literary Legacy of Edith Wharton 536<br /> <i>Candace Waid and Clare Colquitt</i></p> <p>28 Sensations of Style: The Literary Realism of Stephen Crane 557<br /> <i>William E. Cain</i></p> <p>29 Theodore Dreiser and the Force of the Personal 572<br /> <i>Clare Virginia Eby</i></p> <p>Index 587</p>

"All praise to Lamb and Thompson … Comprehensive, well written and carefully edited ... Essential."<br /> <i>Choice</i><br /> <p>"The editors have intended the <i>Companion</i> to be an introduction to the field and a reference tool for 'advanced undergraduates, graduate students, faculty members and general intellectuals'. In this they have succeeded admirably."<br /> <i>Reference Reviews</i></p>

<b>Robert Paul Lamb</b> is Associate Professor of English at Purdue University. The author of many articles on American literature and recipient of Harvard University’s Bowdoin Prize for scholarship, his teaching honors include Harvard’s Stephen J. Botein Prize, Purdue’s University Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching, Purdue’s Liberal Arts Departmental Award for Educational Excellence, and induction into <i>The Purdue Book of Great Teachers</i>.<br /> <p><b>G.R. Thompson</b> is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Purdue University. His previous publications include the <i>Norton Critical Edition of Edgar Allan Poe</i> (2004), <i>Neutral Ground: New Traditionalism and the American Romance Controversy</i> (1999), <i>The Art of Authorial Presence: Hawthorne’s Provincial Tales</i> (1993), <i>Essays and Reviews ofEdgar Allan Poe</i> (1984), <i>Ruined Eden of the Present: Hawthorne, Melville and Poe</i> (1981) and <i>Poe’s Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales</i> (1973).</p>

<i>A Companion to American Fiction, 1865–1914</i> is a groundbreaking collection of essays written by leading critics for a wide audience of students, scholars, and interested general readers. <p>Containing 29 essays and 12 illustrations with accompanying texts, this comprehensive volume is divided into three sections covering historical traditions and genres, contexts and themes, and major authors. The essays address a mixture of canonical and non-canonical subjects; so, alongside treatment of such standard topics as realism, naturalism, and regionalism are contributions on the romance, sentimentalism, early modernism, African American and Native American narratives, women's fiction, class, ethnicity, and the short story. A significant feature of the book is its inclusion of chapters on both frontier and urban narratives, Civil War literature, Darwin's influence on fiction, children's literature, consumer culture, law and narrative, utopian fiction, and ecological literature and ecocriticism. Contributors present lucid syntheses of the best criticism available on their topics and, at the same time, offer original perspectives of their own.</p> <p>This <i>Companion</i> is essential reading for anyone interested in American literature from this important period.</p>

"The editors have intended the <i>Companion</i> to be an introduction to the field and a reference tool for 'advanced undergraduates, graduate students, faculty members and general intellectuals'. In this they have succeeded admirably."<br /> <i>Reference Reviews</i> <!--end--> <br /> <p>"All praise to Lamb and Thompson. If all volumes in the Blackwell "companions" series were are comprehensive, well written and carefully edited as this one (and many have been), the series would stand as a major, perhaps unique, achievement in American literary criticism. . . Essential."<br /> <i>Choice</i></p>

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