Контексты литературной критики Теодора Драйзера с точки зрения издательской практики

Jude Davies

doi:10.22455/2541-7894-2021-11-271-288

Abstract

Theodore Dreiser published over fifty items of literary criticism between 1900 and 1945 on a wide variety of subjects, while additional discussion of literary matters is scattered through his correspondence, memoirs, unpublished speeches, and cultural and philosophical essays. Hitherto this work has proved useful piecemeal, in its illumination of Dreiser’s fiction, while a few outstanding pieces have served to define Dreiser’s version of realism or literary naturalism. This essay takes the literary criticism seriously as a body of work in itself, sketching out some categories and topics, and providing detailed historical contexts for several items, which reveal under-appreciated nuances and engagements in even better-known pieces such as “True Art speaks Plainly” and “Life, Art and America.” The essay sees coherence across the diverse foci of Dreiser’s literary criticism via the concept of the “occasions of literary criticism,” by which is meant the historical and cultural contexts into which he was writing. It charts the roots of Dreiser’s literary criticism in his need to respond to charges of “literary immorality,” its growth through his very particular response to censorship, and its maturity in his suggestion, in a speech given as part of the peace conference in Paris in 1938, of an American literary tradition dedicated to social justice, taking in Mark Twain and H. D. Thoreau as well as the expected cohort of realists and naturalists. The essay concludes by relating these contexts and preoccupations to the history and practice of the Theodore Dreiser Edition.

Highlights

The essay sees coherence across the diverse foci of Dreiser’s literary criticism via the concept of the “occasions of literary criticism,” by which is meant the historical and cultural contexts into which he was writing. It charts the roots of Dreiser’s literary criticism in his need to respond to charges of “literary immorality,” its growth through his very particular response to censorship, and its maturity in his suggestion, in a speech given as part of the peace conference in Paris in 1938, of an American literary tradition dedicated to social justice, taking in Mark Twain and H
The essay concludes by relating these contexts and preoccupations to the history and practice of the Theodore Dreiser Edition
After a period when his literary credentials had been established in the wake of the critical and popular success of 1925’s An American Tragedy, two new developments are visible. Dreiser expanded his field of reference beyond the realists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, engaging with Mark Twain and with Henry David Thoreau in detail,8 and, in specific circumstances, for the right audience, he began to try to piece together a historical account of American literature and its interaction with social justice