American Realism Research Articles

Bending the Color Line: Hidden Identities and Sexual Transgressions in Charles W. Chesnutt's Short Stories

Bending the Color LineHidden Identities and Sexual Transgressions in Charles W. Chesnutt's Short Stories Anna Pochmara (bio) A major strand of African American fiction published at the turn of the twentieth century is structured by a revelation of an intimate secret. In most cases, the hidden information concerns the characters' racial identities and interracial family histories. This figuration is so prevalent that, according to M. Giulia Fabi, an analysis of "the tropes of miscegenation and passing" can best elucidate the central significance, literary artistry, and ideological complexity of these frequently underestimated and understudied narratives (2).1 To different extents, these works are shaped by the melodramatic mode, which "draws into a public arena desires, fears, values and identities which lie beneath the surface of the publicly acknowledged world" (Gledhill 33). This drive towards disclosure is most conspicuously visible in coincidental race-revelation scenes that propel many Black works of the age of realism. Typically for literary recognitions, these moments reveal a "perverse" and "improper" knowledge, a "monstrous transgression of a taboo" (Cave 3, 7, 209). In African American realist narratives, the revelation of the secret does not, however, result in a restoration of order or an unambiguous closure, which characterize conventional melodrama. On the contrary, the texts' endings are frequently open and depart from the "final reward of virtue" and punishment of villainy (Brooks 12). The works question both the melodramatic opposition between good and evil and the polarized division into whiteness and Blackness, which was central for Jim Crow racial classifications. The hidden identities and race revelations in African American fiction challenge the "rigid color line" and expose its invisibility and volatility (Chesnutt, "A Stream" 851). The melodramatic element that permeates a significant segment of turn-of-the-twentieth-century African American narratives is not exceptional when juxtaposed with the corpus of canonical U.S. fiction [End Page 56] of the period. Although traditionally perceived as a reaction against romantic, sentimentalist, and melodramatic aesthetics, American realist and naturalist narratives continued to employ romance, coincidence, and sensationalism rather than complete plausibility, exceptionalism rather than representativeness, and dramatic contrasts rather than a balanced perspective on social life (Chase 1–11; Pizer 264–69; Trachtenberg 190–91). As Keith Newlin points out, the melodramatic aesthetic is key for the works of the naturalist canon, which evoke an immediate reaction in the reader and express a Spencerian, determinist vision of the world (5–15). Similarly, elements of melodrama can also be found in realism. One of the most influential studies of this aesthetic, Peter Brooks's The Melodramatic Imagination, devotes an entire section to Henry James, a canonical realist author. His works, according to Brooks, express an "intensification of consciousness," and the characters' ethical conflicts and choices are imaged "in the polarized and heightened mode of melodrama" (197; see also 153–97). In Charles W. Chesnutt's "Her Virginia Mammy" and "Cicely's Dream," melodrama is key to his narrative aesthetic and it enables him to bend the "rigid color line" to reveal its absurdities. Just as in the case of James's writing, Chesnutt's use of melodrama stems from his specific approach to realism. As Ryan Simmons states, for Chesnutt "realism's purpose is not to document histories but to disassemble and re-create readers' methods for understanding these histories, all with the intent of changing not only what readers know, but also how they know it and how they are capable of responding to it" (3). His fiction is "designed to instill an understanding of racism" because "reality properly portrayed and rightly understood must compel action" (3, 5). Such an understanding of realism is superficially similar to the naturalist novel, which "moralizes or sets out to demonstrate a particular thesis" (Newlin 10). Yet, although Chesnutt diverts from the traditional program of objective, documentary realism (Becker 184–97), his fiction does not represent "a melodramatic vision of human beings at the mercy of forces over which they have little control but whose purpose is ultimately intelligible" (Newlin 15). Instead, he portrays self-aware, conflicted characters who interact with social forces that are too complex to be explained with Spencerian determinism. In Chesnutt's works, the melodramatic vision does not...

Intimate Knowledge in American Naturalism and Realism

Intimate Knowledge in American Naturalism and Realism Katrin Horn (bio) and Katharina Motyl (bio) Wedged between sentimentalism's excessive appeal for sympathy and a community based on domestic ideals on the one hand and modernism's focused study of interiority and stylistic experiments with solipsistic impressions on the other, realism and especially naturalism with their detached narrators and scientific interest in society's structures (and decline) might seem to be a comparatively odd choice for an investigation of intimate knowledge in US American literature. Beyond these stylistic concerns, intimate matters as an avenue of inquiry might seem to stand in sharp contrast also to most recent investigations into the late nineteenth century that have focused on large-scale changes such as the growth of mass media and the consolidation of American national identity. Moreover, in classrooms realism and naturalism have long been employed "to teach the social tensions and ideological conflicts underlying the formation of American culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century" (Ernst et al ix). Yet we propose that to arrive at a fuller assessment of literary naturalism and realism—regarding scope, style, authors—it is equally necessary to pay close attention to their negotiation of the small, intimate concerns of life. In "A Plea for Romantic Fiction," for example, Frank Norris positions the realm of the intimate as naturalism's very domain. Romance, which he uses synonymously with what later came to be called naturalism and which he vehemently differentiates from both sentimentalism and realism (215), is tasked with "prying, peeping, peering into the closets of the bedroom" and the secret box screwed to a shelf in the library (217). Naturalism presents "a bag of hopes and fears and a package of joys and sorrows" to readers, about which Norris comments "That is Life!" (217–18). [End Page vii] Norris here positions naturalism as revealing instincts, passions, and secrets hiding in the depths of the human psyche, while "Realism," in Norris's view, "notes only the surface of things" (215). Although unflatteringly denounced by name in Norris's aforementioned broadside at realism, William Dean Howells also connects the mode of writing he so centrally shaped to intimate knowledge—albeit with a different trajectory—when he formulates the ideal that realism should allow us to "know one another better" (188). Whereas Norris conceives of the naturalist writer in the role of the philosopher who makes known the intimate "penetralia of the soul of man" ("Plea" 220) to investigate how free human will really is, and to what degree the animalistic lurks in all of us, Howells positions the realist writer as an anthropologist creating intimate knowledge and thus, recognition, on the interpersonal and intercommunity levels. These programmatic positions proclaimed by Norris and Howells in their role as literary theorists represent archetypes of naturalist and realist writing, respectively, with which their own literary texts do not always conform. While critics used to decry moments of excessive emotion and sensationalism in naturalist texts as failures to approximate a realist aesthetic, more recently, scholars have identified the aesthetics of melodrama (if not its philosophical underpinnings) as central to the naturalist agenda. According to Keith Newlin, "naturalism often employs the dichotomies and dramatic techniques of melodrama to articulate its thesis. Thus the prevalence of the sensational in plots, the emotional excesses in dialogue and characterization, the gothic portrayals of character, and the overt pronouncement of doctrine" (10). These quotations suggest that a closer look at intimate knowledge in and through naturalist and realist literature is not only warranted but will also result in a more differentiated assessment of these modes of writing. Focusing on intimacy may, in fact, help contour a central distinction between the two. We understand intimacy as including yet going far beyond the concerns of sex and sexuality, which are not only the most intuitive associations with that term (see D'Emilio and Freedman), but which extant scholarship has also noted as among naturalism's chief concerns. Yet sex might be most relevant to naturalism only in its least intimate versions, namely in its "fascination with sexual violence" (Campbell, Bitter 4) and to index characters' being governed by drives and instincts.1 For instance, when the eponymous...

“In Ireland I’d Have Starved”: North American Fiction about the Great Irish Famine, 1850–1918

“In Ireland I’d Have Starved”: North American Fiction about the Great Irish Famine, 1850–1918 Christopher Cusack (bio), Marguérite Corporaal (bio), and Lindsay Janssen (bio) this dossier brings together popular fiction originally published between 1850 and 1918 in the United States or Canada that represents, in various ways, the Great Irish Famine, a watershed event in Irish and Irish-diasporic history.1 The Great Famine (1845–51) was caused by successive failures of the potato crop and the seriously inadequate government response to this agricultural crisis, and resulted in at least one million deaths. Moreover, between 1845 and 1855 over two million Irish emigrated, mainly to the United States, Canada, and Great Britain.2 Though Irish emigration figures had been increasing before the Famine, the crisis drastically accelerated out-migration. By 1890 about 40 percent of Irish-born people were living outside of Ireland, mainly in the United States and Great Britain.3 Not surprisingly, the Famine is generally considered one of the formative events at the heart of Irish American and Irish Canadian identities.4 In many ways, it has become what Margaret Kelleher calls a “charter myth,” even though Irish migration to America significantly predates [End Page 129] the mid-nineteenth century and even though millions more actually came over after rather than during the Famine.5 Despite its centrality in Irish-diasporic history, the notion that the memory of the Famine was so traumatic that it has been culturally repressed persists in popular understandings of the Irish-diasporic past and in some scholarship on the North American Irish diaspora.6 This notion, however, is not borne out by the available source material. On the contrary, during the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, the Famine was a prevalent theme in journalism and fiction written by Irish-diaspora authors based in the United States and Canada, as well as in Irish-interest material produced by North American writers without Irish ancestry. However, most scholarship on diasporic identity formation during this era focuses primarily on journalism and contemporary historiography, and literature in particular remains a sorely neglected resource.7 This contribution showcases a considerable yet largely unknown corpus of popular fiction published between 1848 and 1918 in the United States or Canada that engages with the legacy of the Famine. In particular, our work underscores the added value of fiction for examining processes of diasporic identity formation and affiliation. In so doing, it also offers starting points for critical reconsiderations of established narratives regarding the position of the Great Famine in the diasporic imagination. This body of fiction is valuable not only because it comprises a sizable repository of materials that imaginatively engage with the Great Famine but also because these texts once reached a substantial and diverse audience. Recollections of the Famine can be found across the full range of fictional genres during the period, including romantic didacticism, regionalism, (urban) realism, and [End Page 130] “lace curtain” fiction, as well as in texts that straddle multiple genres.8 For the Irish characters in works by romantic-didactic authors, such as Mary Francis Cusack’s From Killarney to New York (1877) and Mary Anne Sadlier’s Bessy Conway (1861), the Famine provided an opportunity to overcome adversity and demonstrate their steadfast Irish Catholic faith. Nationalist writers employed famine memory and the charge of British responsibility to justify Fenianism, the campaign for Home Rule, and later republicanism. For political novels like James Doran’s Zanthon (1891), famine suffering served as a first step on the journey to the United States for its eponymous protagonist. Moreover, novels such as Zanthon and John Brennan’s Erin Mor (1892) cast US republicanism and its doctrine of liberty as the solution to Ireland’s colonial hardships. Conversely, Irish American (urban) realism was more critical of diasporic self-presentations and, as shown by John Talbot Smith’s story “How The McGuinness Saved His Pride” (1891), excerpted below, Irish American intolerance toward other immigrant communities. Such examples indicate that in the United States and Canada, as in Ireland, famine memory was deployed for a variety of objectives.9 Authors assimilated such memories into their preferred genres and...

Liminal Figures and Infinities: Edward Hopper as Magic Realism

Liminal Figures and Infinities: Edward Hopper as Magic Realism Michael Motoc Abstract While numerous art historians characterized Edward Hopper‘s art as a prime example of American realism with readily identifiable empty spaces and lonely figures, these characterizations are often qualified by an acknowledgement that Hopper‘s art has strange, often unsettling undertones which are not easily explained through the lens of realism nor have clear comparison in American art. This paper aims to argue that Edward Hopper is more accurately characterized as a magic realist, both artistically and philosophically, noting in particular Hopper‘s interest in certain aspects of film, surrealism, and existential philosophy. The paper points towards Hopper‘s use of liminality and (seemingly) infinite spaces and constructions as non-naturalistic elements that are more easily characterized as magic realist in nature and which help to explain the unsettling effects found in Hopper‘s work. Finally, the paper briefly explores additional readings of Hopper‘s work that may be fruitful in future scholarship, particularly in answering the so-called -Hopper Paradox?, coined by Winfried Fluck, and the stoic nature of Hopper‘s figures. Full Text: PDF DOI: 10.15640/ijaah.v9n1a2

The Ideology of Self-making and the White Working Class in Rebecca Harding Davis’ "Life in the Iron Mills"

Rebecca Harding Davis’ novella Life in the Iron Mills, published in 1861 in The Atlantic Monthly, is now considered a landmark of early American realism. This paper analyses the text’s depiction of the white working class and the ideological consequences of the myth of upward mobility and self-making, which are presented as an impossibility to Hugh Wolfe, the story’s main character. I will argue that Davis’ choice to offer a representation of the precarious lives of the workers of Northern industrial capitalism implies a criticism of the quintessentially American narrative of upward mobility, and a subsequent reflection on how foundational narratives operate in a society that is not homogeneous in terms of race or class. More specifically, I willmaintain that Life in the Iron Mills operates as a contestation to the myth of the self- made man, evinced by the comparison between Hugh Wolfe’s situation and that of the mill owners, who encourage his aspirations from an oblivious position of privilege. Lastly, Hugh’s tragic death will be taken as proof that the myth of self-making mystifies the actual social and economic dynamics of industrial capitalism.

María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, “White Slaves,” and Mexican Representation in the American Realist Chronology

Research Article| January 01 2021 María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, “White Slaves,” and Mexican Representation in the American Realist Chronology Alicia Contreras Alicia Contreras University of California, Merced Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literary Realism (2021) 53 (2): 112–116. https://doi.org/10.5406/amerlitereal.53.2.0112 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Alicia Contreras; María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, “White Slaves,” and Mexican Representation in the American Realist Chronology. American Literary Realism 1 January 2021; 53 (2): 112–116. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/amerlitereal.53.2.0112 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressAmerican Literary Realism Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2020 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Over Here: America’s Great War Mobilization and Transnational Alternatives in Mary Austin and Ellen Glasgow

Research Article| November 01 2020 Over Here: America’s Great War Mobilization and Transnational Alternatives in Mary Austin and Ellen Glasgow Daniel Mrozowski Daniel Mrozowski Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut Daniel Mrozowski is the Academic Director of Graduate Studies in English at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. His most recent work, co-written with Kirk Boyle, “Screening Cosmos-Politanism: The Anthropocenic Politics of Outer Space Media,” appeared in Science Fiction Film and Television in 2019, and his work on naturalism has appeared in Studies in American Literary Naturalism and Haunting Realities: Naturalist Gothic and American Realism. He also coedited a collection, The Great Recession in Fiction, Film, and Television: A Busted Culture, published by Lexington Books. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google CR: The New Centennial Review (2020) 20 (3): 127–152. https://doi.org/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.20.3.0127 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Daniel Mrozowski; Over Here: America’s Great War Mobilization and Transnational Alternatives in Mary Austin and Ellen Glasgow. CR: The New Centennial Review 1 November 2020; 20 (3): 127–152. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.20.3.0127 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressCR: The New Centennial Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © Michigan State University Board of Trustees Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

THE REALISM OF THE AMERICAN POLITICAL SYSTEM IN ACHIEVING INTERNATIONAL STABILITY: THE MIDDLE EAST AS A MODEL (2003-2020)

Purpose of the study: This research seeks to analyze the nature of American realism in achieving international stability in the Middle East.
 Methodology: This research adopted the logical, historical, and decision-making approaches to measure the extent of its impact on the structure of the international, regional system.
 Main Findings: Based on the nature of the international strategic situation, the American administration is required to change its approach in maintaining its interests through the use of realism in its traditional and modern concept and its contemporary lines of thought that reflect the American political thought at the external level in dealing with the changes and events taking place in the structure of the regional system in the Middle East.
 Applications of this study: This research is scientifically and practically significant since it: Contributes to enriching the theoretical aspect of the academic studies on developments in the reality of the American administration and its use of this model in achieving international stability in the Middle East region.
 Novelty/Originality of this study: This research completely discussed the perceptions about the tracks of the American administration and the extent of use of realism in achieving international stability, especially in the Middle East region. As well as define the realist conditions, means, methods, and tools adopted by the American administration in strengthening the power theory to achieve international stability and enhancing its position in the Middle East.

Postcritical Howells: American Realism and Liberal Guilt

Abstract This essay explores the concept of liberal guilt in William Dean Howells’s fiction, focusing especially on his 1888 novel Annie Kilburn. Genealogies of liberal guilt rarely mention Howells, and yet no American writer has more painstakingly elaborated the embarrassing predicament of middle-class complicity in social arrangements that entail the widespread suffering of others. I provide a summary of theoretical positions on liberal guilt as a structure of feeling that entails what Richard Rorty calls “doubt about [one’s] own sensitivity to the pain and humiliation of others, doubt that present institutional arrangements are adequate to deal with this pain and humiliation.” Howells felt these doubts profoundly, and yet he understood liberal guilt as a productive emotional and intellectual predicament. Put simply, Howells viewed liberal guilt, like realism itself, as an attitude of resigned acceptance of persistent social injustices but an attitude capable of animating, rather than dissipating, liberal commitments and public agendas.

The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism ed. by Keith Newlin

Reviewed by: The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism ed. by Keith Newlin Katherine Fusco (bio) The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism, edited by Keith Newlin. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. xiv + 736 pp, 46 photographs, 5 tables. Cloth, $150.00; Ebook, $149.99. In editor Keith Newlin’s introduction to The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism he makes clear that this volume’s project is to help readers think about realism now. This editorial decision is reflected in the centering of women writers in the “Contexts” section, with chapters by Donna Campbell and Sophia Forster, as well as the focus on the realisms of immigrant writers and authors of color in chapters by Ramón J. Guerra, Jean Lee Cole, and Jolie A. Sheffer. Many of these chapters, which feature authors such as María Amparo Ruiz de Burton and Mourning Dove (Christine Quintasket/Humishuma), look at the way authors previously marginalized by literary canon formation strategically or partially took up realist techniques. For example, Sheffer considers the way writers of color “frequently combine allegory and realism in order to articulate that their individual stories of racism and injustice are, in fact, collective stories” (272). In her chapter on “American Realism and Gender,” Donna M. Campbell makes a similar point about women’s authorship, arguing that “authors such as Gilman, Hopkins, Zitkala-Ša, Mourning Dove, Far, Mena, Austin, and Wharton drew from forms of writing not typically associated with realism, such as utopian fiction and Native American legends, yet they retained realism as a literary technique even as they extended its concepts beyond what Howells and James would have considered appropriate” (60). Chapters such as these expand the canon of realism to be sure, but they also enliven the stakes of the literary movement’s formal and ideological habits. In other words, by showing how women authors and authors of color riffed on, challenged, and exceeded the tradition of Howellsian realism, these scholars help readers long familiar with realist literature see it in new ways and help [End Page 239] novice readers understand realism as a movement with real formal stakes. This aspect of The Oxford Handbook and Newlin’s thoughtful editing would alone be enough to recommend the volume. But beyond this fresh and more expansive view of realism, the handbook is also valuable for its pedagogical uses, both in Part VI, which explicitly focuses on the teaching of realism, and in Part IV “Representing the Real” and Part V “Realism and the Other Arts.” These latter two sections offer important contextual materials for teachers and students of realism. Part IV is particularly exciting for the way it expands the volume’s look at realism to consider intellectual modes of inquiry “beyond the aesthetics of depicting common life” (Newlin 11). The chapters focused on the natural sciences and medicine are especially engaging, including essays by Andrew Hebard, Melanie Dawson, Gary Totten, and Phillip Barrish. Beginning with Howells’s discussion of the realist depicting the grasshopper, Hebard’s chapter poses a provocative question, how to “assess Howells’s gesture toward natural history at a moment when natural history was on the decline as a dominant scientific paradigm” (360)? Tracing the shift in science from natural science’s more writerly and observational style toward methods more grounded in experimentation and statistical thinking, Hebard argues that changes in the scientific method offered realists such as Howells a way to think about changing literary conventions. In her chapter, Dawson follows on Wai Chi Dimock’s work on literature’s relationship to a science that emphasized “the dumbfounding largeness of the universe” (qtd. in Dawson 375). Focusing specifically on geological deep time, Dawson considers the formal challenge new geologic knowledge presented to realists committed to the observable detail, arguing that “in confronting both ancient histories and deep time in the natural world, realist literary works exhibit signs of anxiety, shifting either into modes of romance or naturalism” (376). Drawing on the work of Cheryll Glotfelty, Totten takes an ecocrititical approach to highlight realist literature’s interest in the “appropriation of natural spaces” to a consumer culture (396), as demonstrated in the novels of Edith Wharton and stories such as Sarah...

Becoming Carlotta: A Biographical Novel

Becoming Carlotta: A Biographical Novel

Rhythm and the “Postal Unconscious” in Suburban Sketches: W. D. Howells’s Realism and the Atlantic Monthly at the Turn of the 1870s

이 연구는 지금까지 경시되어 온 W. D. 하월즈의 여행기 『교외 소묘』를 논하는 것을 통해 미국 사실주의의 성립에 리듬 의식이 결부되어 있음에 주목한다. 삶을 구성하는 한 측면이자 소통을 위한 재현 형식의 구성적 요소 중 하나인 이 리듬은,『교외 소묘』의 경우, 특히 출판 매체였던 『아틀랜틱 먼쓸리』와의 관계 속에서 형성되었다. 본고는 그 과정을 밝힘으로써 하월즈의 사실주의는 당대의 변화하는 소통의 미디어적 조건, 즉 페니 우편 등으로 가속된 소통의 템포를 반영하는 동시에 이를 재구성하려는 “우편적 무의식”이었음을 드러낸다.This paper aims to clarify the involvement of what can be considered “rhythm” in the establishment of American realism by focusing on a hitherto neglected work by W. D. Howells, Suburban Sketches. I argue that this rhythm is both an aspect of represented life and a structuring element of the representational form. In the case of Suburban Sketches, it was primarily formed in relation to its periodical publishing medium, the Atlantic Monthly. By showing the layers of the interactions between that magazine and the text of Suburban Sketches, this study reveals that Howells’s realism was an attempt to produce an interstice for different speeds of life and communicative modes from the dominant ones which it partly affirms, too. I argue this was carried out in challenge of the changing media condition that saw the consolidation of the Penny Post and telegraph service at the turn of the 1870s.

Sociological Jurisprudence: A Reference of Functional Approach of Law

Sociological school has three dimensions i.e. sociological jurisprudence, sociology of law and socio-legal research; the philosophy of Ihering and Roscoe Pound refers to sociological jurisprudence which is functional jurisprudence, the philosophy of Durkheim, Duguit, Ehrlich, Max Weber, Talcott Pearson and Selznick represent sociology of law which depicts interrelationship between and among various discipline and socio-legal research covers American Realism. Therefore, American Realism is the left wing of the sociological jurisprudence. For this school law is developed and repealed based on social necessity and interests. Balancing of interest, social engineering, social solidarity and effective settlement of social problems are the functions of law under this school of thought. It establishes relationship between and among law, society, technology, and accepted social culture. Functions of law in society are the primary concern of law not the enactment of law. So, law is society specific but not of authority’s choice.

Formalism vs. Pragmatism in Legal Philosophy

Formalism and pragmatism are contemporary philosophical debate; formalism supports the domination of prevalent doctrine and their absolute implementation whereas pragmatism is practical implementation of doctrine and principles. Formalism follows deductive approach whereas pragmatism applies empirical approach. Nevertheless, both are the branches of positivism. Yet, formalism supports determinacy and pragmatism endorses indeterminacy. There are different types of positivism which are legal positivism, inclusive positivism, exclusive positivism, logical positivism, critical positivism, normative positivism, evolutionary positivism, sociological positivism, and pragmatic positivism. Formalism is the part of positivism because positivism is broader than formalism. Formalism supports the domination of form and structure over the content and matters mentioned in documents. In legal philosophy, it refers to the domination of rule and procedure over external reference and guidance. No emotions, feeling and value judgement can make effect in decision making process of judges which is based on certain procedures and doctrine whatever written in the legal text. Legal formalism treats law as a math and science which implements the provision strictly without considering extraneous matter. It is internally coherent in the decision making process as the formula of mathematics. Contributors of formalism are Bentham, Austin, Prof. Hart, Kelson, and Joseph Raj. Formalism of Dworkin is different than British positivist because he relies on integrity of practices of principles. Pragmatism is first coined and implemented by William James and John Dewey. They burrowed the philosophic pragmatism of Charles Peirce. However they are not the jurist or legal practitioners. Pragmatism is also one of the branches of positivism which follows rule scepticism. American realist rejects to call them as philosophers. American realist i.e. Justice Holmes, Justice Grey, Llewellyn, and Jerome Frank support pragmatism. Moreover, Richard Posner, activist of law and economics, recommends democratic pragmatism. Pragmatism is contextual, anti-foundational, instrumental, and perspectival. It supports open ended, multi dimensional and multi faceted method of decision making. Under pragmatism, fixed accepted principle is rejected. Positivism emerges from the institutional process in which political role is more vital, which is in fact parliamentary process. Despite this notion, if we look at the philosophic tradition, latest philosophy is more pragmatic than prior philosophic movement.

Relevancy of CLS Movement in Jurisprudence; A Reference of Nepal

Critical Legal Studies (CLS) is the movement, as the successor of American realism, rejects almost all previous philosophy of law. According to this movement, early philosophy has only analyzed brighter aspect of the laws and has forgotten darker side. As each and every discipline has both dark and bright aspect, CLS movement has only looked upon darker aspect of the legal activities. It has evaluated the law from the top of the Ivory Tower. Prior than this movement, the critical tradition was appeared in other social discipline. Gradually, it started to influence in the field of law. CLS movement emerged when some of the professors of Yale Law School i.e. Mark Tushet, Duncan Kennedy, David Trubek was fired from their jobs as they became extreme critic of formalist tradition of legal education and unconcerned behaviour of senior professor. Later, some of the professor of the Harvard Law School widely criticized and demanded for reappointment of them. Instead, they also became scapegoat. Then, they started to lunch movement from critical tradition with series of conferences, seminars and symposium continuously. Student also exhibited their concern in inconsistencies of law in book and law in actions. The fired professors also adapted the movement of students. All these incidents contributed critical legal study movement to be flourished in America, which gradually spread into other country. They looked at dark side of legal discipline in multitude of issues. They developed new dimensions to look upon legal discipline which is later accepted by feminism jurisprudence and LatCrit movement with racial rights issues. Finally, hierarchy without quality is rejected by this movement.

Realism in Legal Philosophy: A Reference of Nepal

Realism is the result of the fusion of formalism and interpretivisim. As formalism becomes too rigid in the application of philosophy, interpretivism went away far from the realistic trend of the philosophy. As a result realism movement emerged in the realm of philosophy. Same pragmatic concept of philosophy has been implemented in law by Justice Holmes. In fact there are two movement of realism; one is American and another is Scandinavian. American realism is the pragmatic movement of American philosophy whereas Scandinavian realism is the pragmatic movement of Europe. American realism in law describes the practices of the court whereas Scandinavian realism highlights on stimuli of psychology. Nepalese courts are also following pragmatism in many cases. Under realism, multi-discipline and their principles can be adapted in the decision making process to make the verdict pragmatic by filling the gap of legislation.

Revisionist Approaches to American Realism and Naturalism

Book Review| April 01 2019 Revisionist Approaches to American Realism and Naturalism Revisionist Approaches to American Realism and Naturalism. Edited by Jutta Ernst, Sabina Matter-Seibel, and Klaus H. Schmidt. Heidelberg: Universitätserlag Winter, 2018. 283 pp. Cloth, 45€. Donald Pizer Donald Pizer Tulane University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literary Realism (2019) 51 (3): 281–282. https://doi.org/10.5406/amerlitereal.51.3.0281 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Donald Pizer; Revisionist Approaches to American Realism and Naturalism. American Literary Realism 1 January 2019; 51 (3): 281–282. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/amerlitereal.51.3.0281 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressAmerican Literary Realism Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

From shame to fame: The improbable career of the great anatomist-surgeon D. Hayes Agnew.

David Hayes Agnew began his career as a country doctor in rural Pennsylvania in 1838. After a 3-year diversion as a partner in a large ironworks business that went bankrupt in 1846, Agnew, seriously in debt, returned to the medical profession in Cochranville, PA, hoping to focus on surgery. Recognizing that he needed to improve his knowledge of anatomy, he purchased cadavers from Philadelphia and dissected at home in his spare time. When he was finished dissecting, he covertly moved bodies to a nearby pond so he could later collect skeletons after eels had removed the remaining soft tissues. This worked well until Agnew and the townspeople found out that a local fisherman, known for selling the most delicious eels, fished exclusively from this pond. Agnew was asked to leave Cochranville and he moved to Philadelphia, where he purchased the Philadelphia School of Anatomy and worked as a surgeon at Blockley Hospital. During the Civil War, he became renowned for his ability to manage gunshot wounds. Agnew was upwardly mobile in Philadelphia, becoming one of America's most prominent 19th-century academic surgeons. When President James Garfield was shot by an assassin, Agnew was called to care for him. When he retired from his position as the John Rhea Barton Professor of the Principles and Practice of Surgery at the University of Pennsylvania, the medical students hired the famous American realist painter, Thomas Eakins, to produce The Agnew Clinic, which became one of the artist's two most important paintings. Clin. Anat. 32:661-671, 2019. © 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF A “RESCUE CULTURE”. INSOLVENCY GLOBALIZATION

ABSTRACTWe are heading towards a phenomenon of internationalization and globalization of the substantiation of law, due to the fact that Romania is, inevitably, part of the process of integration and reflection of its own identity in a European and global context. Ultimately, law derives from observing the society and analysing its needs, passing through the filter of equity the final legal form in order to ensure the completeness of law, and also the structural coherence of society. Although the continental European legal culture is attached to the “general will”, globalization managed to erase many of the symbolical boundaries between the legal culture promoted by the Common-law, the one promoted by our system deeply markedby the Romano-Germanic System, and also the legal system outlined by American Realist trends, thus allowing the law to become the result of the self-adaptation of the society, not just the creation of the State.

Rebecca Harding Davis: A Life among Writers by Sharon M. Harris

Reviewed by: Rebecca Harding Davis: A Life among Writers by Sharon M. Harris Ben Sammons Rebecca Harding Davis: A Life among Writers. By Sharon M. Harris. (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2018. Pp. [vi], 493. $59.99, ISBN 978-1-946684-30-1.) Sharon M. Harris's Rebecca Harding Davis: A Life among Writers is by far the most exhaustive biography to date on this pioneering and yet understudied American author. The volume dramatically extends Harris's biographical work in Rebecca Harding Davis and American Realism (Philadelphia, 1991), primarily a work of literary criticism, and in Davis's autobiographical writings that Harris and Janice Milner Lasseter coedited under the title Rebecca Harding Davis: Writing Cultural Autobiography (Nashville, 2001). Harris's new release also deepens the biographical writing of Jane Atteridge Rose and Jean Pfaelzer, neither of whose monographs aims at so comprehensive an account of Rebecca Harding Davis's life. The new book, then, combining analysis of Davis's literature, social activism, and private life in a finely detailed portrait of the woman, will become an indispensable resource for Davis scholars. Of particular use will be Harris's encyclopedic coverage of the author's voluminous oeuvre. The extremely thorough catalog will enable researchers to situate even obscure texts in the wider context of Davis's life. In addition to facilitating such specific searching, Harris's all-inclusive approach highlights the sheer scope of Davis's output, which runs the gamut from serious literature to commercial fiction and from bold exposés to light opinion pieces. Thus, Harris's book valuably reveals just how disproportionate one's appreciation of Davis is if confined to her oft-anthologized short story "Life in the Iron-Mills" (1861). Harris's monograph further suggests the reach of Davis's influence by depicting her not only as the literary leader of a gifted family of professional writers—Harris compares the Davises to the Jameses—but also as a recognized [End Page 435] host to the literati of Philadelphia and beyond. The implicit, and eminently defensible, thesis seems to be that Davis deserves a wider hearing than she has yet received. In that implicit quality of Harris's argument, though, lies a weakness. The book positions Davis in the thick of a vibrant, East Coast intelligentsia and records her consistently provocative voice from within that milieu. However, Harris does not advance a clear thesis about how Davis appropriated or influenced that literate culture in which she attained a degree of renown. Why, after all, does it matter that she knew all of these people? What mark did they make on her, and how did she change them? In calling Davis "A Conservative Progressive," Harris does illuminate a crucial feature of the author's moral vision—namely, that Davis's perennial agitation for social justice emerged from a set of traditional and Christian convictions that, while sometimes harmonizing and sometimes clashing with one another, often made her advocacy as unsettling to the political Left as to the Right (chap. 6). However, this claim is not entirely new to Davis scholarship, or even to Harris's own writing about Davis. Indeed, her previous monograph on Davis does more to commend a particular understanding of the author's legacy than the newer book does. The rich detail offered here about Davis's writing and relationships will certainly benefit scholars of her work; it could serve them even more if it were enlisted in support of a more focused and probing thesis about the literary, social, or historical meaning of Davis's life. Ben Sammons Wingate University Copyright © 2019 Southern Historical Association