Following the Money: New Scholarship on American Realism

Abstract

After putting down two powerful new assessments of US realism—Andrew Lawson's Downwardly Mobile: The Changing Fortunes of American Realism (2012) and Nathaniel Cadle's The Mediating Nation: Late American Realism, Globalization, and the Progressive State (2014)—it is hard not to be reminded of James Carville's 1992 campaign motto, a linchpin of the Clinton ascendancy: “It's the economy, stupid.” Many smart Americanists of the last 30 years have insisted that American realism is essentially a meditation on the meaning of life under the regime of US-style capitalism, but the appearance of Lawson's and Cadle's books signals a new era in the field's maturing appreciation that it really is “all about the Benjamins”—to borrow another hackneyed pop-culture slogan. Together, these two books suggest what is possible when well-informed literary and economic analysis meet to reassess the print culture of an era punctuated by seismic financial transformations. In their vastly different outlooks, however, these two studies also demonstrate the need for theoretical resources beyond those offered by Marx, who continues to loom, sometimes unproductively, over accounts of economic experience among scholars of US realism. Lawson demonstrates that Marx can still teach us something about the mimetic urge that grows up in reaction to the dematerializing tendencies of a money economy, but Cadle's study takes us someplace genuinely new in aligning the major practitioners of realism with a broad cultural “reorientation toward the state as a means of empowering Americans to harness emerging modes of transnational circulation” (7). Giovanni Arrighi has a larger role to play than Marx in this conversation about the role of print media in the ascendancy of the US economic system and “the transfer of global hegemony from Europe to North America,” and thinkers such as Louis Brandeis, Randolph Bourne, and W.E.B. Du Bois help Cadle link major writers of the period to a Progressive spirit that Marx would have found deeply problematic (7). Cadle may not go far enough in exploring the literary implications of the transnational turn in US realism, but his book is a provocation that scholars interested in the economic underpinnings of the field should carefully consider.