A Companion to American Fiction, 1865-1914 is a groundbreaking collection of essays written by leading critics for a wide audience of students, scholars, and interested general readers.

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.

This Companion is essential reading for anyone interested in American literature from this important period.

Robert Paul Lamb 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 The Purdue Book of Great Teachers.

G.R. Thompson is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Purdue University. His previous publications include the Norton Critical Edition of Edgar Allan Poe (2004), Neutral Ground: New Traditionalism and the American Romance Controversy (1999), The Art of Authorial Presence: Hawthorne's Provincial Tales (1993), Essays and Reviews ofEdgar Allan Poe (1984), Ruined Eden of the Present: Hawthorne, Melville and Poe (1981) and Poe's Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (1973).

List of Illustrations x

Notes on Contributors xi

Acknowledgments xviii

Editors' Introduction 1
Robert Paul Lamb and G. R. Thompson

PART I Historical Traditions and Genres 13

1 The Practice and Promotion of American Literary Realism 15
Nancy Glazener

2 Excitement and Consciousness in the Romance Tradition 35
William J. Scheick

3 The Sentimental and Domestic Traditions, 1865-1900 53
Gregg Camfield

4 Morality, Modernity, and "Malarial Restlessness": American Realism in its Anglo-European Contexts 77
Winfried Fluck

5 American Literary Naturalism 96
Christophe Den Tandt

6 American Regionalism: Local Color, National Literature, Global Circuits 119
June Howard

7 Women Authors and the Roots of American Modernism 140
Linda Wagner-Martin

8 The Short Story and the Short-Story Sequence, 1865-1914 149
J. Gerald Kennedy

PART II Contexts and Themes 175

9 Ecological Narrative and Nature Writing 177
S. K. Robisch

10 "The Frontier Story": The Violence of Literary History 201
Christine Bold

11 Native American Narratives: Resistance and Survivance 222
Gerald Vizenor

12 Representing the Civil War and Reconstruction: From Uncle Tom to Uncle Remus 240
Kathleen Diffley

13 Engendering the Canon: Women's Narratives, 1865-1914 260
Grace Farrell

14 Confronting the Crisis: African American Narratives 279
Dickson D. Bruce, Jr.

15 Fiction's Many Cities 296
Sidney H. Bremer

16 Mapping the Culture of Abundance: Literary Narratives and Consumer Culture 318
Sarah Way Sherman

17 Secrets of the Master's Deed Box: Narrative and Class 340
Christopher P. Wilson

18 Ethnic Realism 356
Robert M. Dowling

19 Darwin, Science, and Narrative 377
Bert Bender

20 Writing in the "Vulgar Tongue": Law and American Narrative 395
William E. Moddelmog

21 Planning Utopia 411
Thomas Peyser

22 American Children's Narrative as Social Criticism, 1865-1914 428
Gwen Athene Tarbox

PART III Major Authors 449

23 An Idea of Order at Concord: Soul and Society in the Mind of Louisa May Alcott 451
John Matteson

24 America Can Break Your Heart: On the Significance of Mark Twain 468
Robert Paul Lamb

25 William Dean Howells and the Bourgeois Quotidian: Affection, Skepticism, Disillusion 499
Michael Anesko

26 Henry James in a New Century 518
John Carlos Rowe

27 Toward a Modernist Aesthetic: The Literary Legacy of Edith Wharton 536
Candace Waid and Clare Colquitt

28 Sensations of Style: The Literary Realism of Stephen Crane 557
William E. Cain

29 Theodore Dreiser and the Force of the Personal 572
Clare Virginia Eby

Index 587