Selected Literary Criticism: Vol. I: 1859-1885 , and: Selected Literary Criticism: Vol. II: 1886-1897 , and: Selected Literary Criticism: Vol. III: 1898-1920 (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews 319 W. D. Howells. Selected Literary Criticism: Vol. I: 1859-1885. Text selection and Introduction by Ulrich Halfmann. Notes to the text by Ulrich Halfmann and Christoph K. Lohmann. Texts established by Don L. Cook, Christoph K. Lohmann, and David J. Nordloh. Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1993. xxiv + 408 pp. $39.95. W. D. Howells. Selected Literary Criticism: Vol. II: 1886-1897. Text selection and Introduction by Donald Pizer. Notes to the texts by Christoph K. Lohmann and Donald Pizer. Texts established by Don L. Cook, Christoph K. Lohmann, and David J. Nordloh. Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1993. xxi + 410 pp. $39.95. W. D. Howells. Selected Literary Criticism: Vol. Ill: 1898-1920. Text selection and Introduction by Ronald Gottesman. Notes to the texts by Ronald Gottesman and Christoph K. Lohmann. Texts established by Don L. Cook, Christoph K. Lohmann, and David J. Nordloh. Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1993. xx + 323 pp. $39.95. By Brenda Murphy, University of Connecticut These three volumes are part of the standard edition of Howells's work that has been steadily issuing forth from Indiana University for a number of years. As Ronald Gottesman notes in the Introduction to the third volume, the pieces collected here "should confirm for Howells a position among his contemporaries as a critic second only to Henry James, as he was second only to James as a fictionist" (xi). The editors have made a judicious selection of Howells's criticism in these impeccably edited volumes. They provide a fair representation of his work chronologically as well as a clear sense of his perennial critical agendas: the championing of realism in fiction and the introduction of European writers and 320 The Henry James Review new American writers to the American reading public. Howells's mission as the champion of realism is well known. It is the main thrust of his best-known critical work, Criticism and Fiction (1891), culled from the "Editor's Study" columns he wrote for Harper's Monthly during the 1880s. The editors include this work in full, but the context provided by other selections from this period shows that the rather polemical tone of this volume was not Howells's only critical note, even during his most embattled period. What emerges most strikingly from a reading of these volumes is not so much Howells's dogged devotion to realism as his catholicity of interest, his incredibly broad acquaintance with the literature of his time, and his openness to new ideas, new writers, and new forms. Asked to name "My Favorite Novelist and His Best Book" for Munsey's Magazine in 1897, at the age of sixty, Howells wrote an autobiography of reading that ranged from youthful appreciation oÃ- Don Quixote, Dickens, and Thackeray, to an illuminating discovery of Turgenev and Tolstoy, to a mature appreciation of Ibsen, Björnson, Maartens, Verga, Valdés, Galdós, Daudet, Maupassant, Flaubert, Zola, and Maeterlinck, as well as Hardy, Moore, Austen, George Eliot, Hawthorne, Stowe, Frederic, Mark Twain, Fuller, Crane, Cahan, and Jewett. "Lately," he wrote, "I got hold of a novel by a Polish novelist, Sinkiewicz, which instantly became my favorite" (II, 286). The contents of these three volumes are a compelling reminder of one of Howells's favorite roles, the "discoverer" of young American writers. Besides Frederic, Fuller, Crane, Cahan, and Jewett, there are perceptive essays here on Chesnutt, Dunbar, Garland, Norris, Herne, Harte, Murfree, Hay, Wilkins, Whitman, Ade, Herrick, Bellamy, Zangwill, and many other writers. Of Emily Dickinson's Poems, Howells wrote in 1891: "If nothing else had come out of our life but this strange poetry we should feel that in the work of Emily Dickinson America, or New England rather, had made a distinctive addition to the literature of the world, and could not be left out of any record of it" (II, 164-65). Except for Tolstoy, however, there was no writer who earned greater praise from Howells than his friend and sometime "discovery," Henry James. Howells's writings about James were collected into a volume called The Discovery of a Genius by Albert Mordell in 1961. Nine of the fifteen items by Howells collected there have been included in this edition...