The Rise of American Realism

Realist fiction is traditionally associated with France (Honoré Balzac, Émile Zola) and England (Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot). We will read a number of important American realist writers (including Stephen Crane, Edith Wharton, Henry James, and Theodore Dreiser) in order to understand what might be distinctive about American realism and what it might owe to its European forerunner.