This national narrative of progress contained within it other, very different narratives. The Native population of the continental United States, which estimates place as high as five million people in 1492, and which had dwindled to 600,000 by 1800,would reach a low point of 250,000 in the 1890s. The history of Natives between 1864 and 1890 was marked by broken treaties, forced relocation, the near-extermination of their primary source of sustenance (the bison population was reduced from roughly ten million to about one thousand in a mere two and a half decades), and unprovoked assaults - euphemistically called "Indian Wars" - on peaceful civilians by federal troops, from the barbaric Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 to the slaughter of three hundred men, women, and children at Wounded Knee in 1890...

A Companion to American Fiction 1865-1914 is a groundbreaking collection of essays written by leading critics for a wide audience of students, scholars, and interested general readers.

Containing 29 essays and 12 illustrations with accompanying texts, this comprehensive volume is divided into three sections covering historical traditions and genres, contexts and themes, and major authors. The essays address a mixture of canonical and non-canonical subjects; so, alongside treatment of such standard topics as realism, naturalism, and regionalism are contributions on the romance,sentimentalism, early modernism, African American and Native American narratives,women's fiction, class, ethnicity, and the short story. A significant feature of the book is its inclusion of chapters on both frontier and urban narratives, Civil War literature, Darwin's influence on fiction, children's literature,consumer culture, law and narrative, utopian fiction, and ecological literature and ecocriticism. Contributors present lucid syntheses of the best criticism available on their topics and, at the same time, offer original perspectives of their own.The Companion is a book that no one interested in nineteenth-century fiction or American literature can do without.

List of Illustrations

Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgments

Editors' Introduction

Robert Paul Lamb and G. R. Thompson

PART I Historical Traditions and Genres

1 The Practice and Promotion of American Literary Realism

Nancy Glazener

2 Excitement and Consciousness in the Romance Tradition

William J. Scheick

3 The Sentimental and Domestic Traditions, 1865-1900

Gregg Camfield

4 Morality, Modernity, and "Malarial Restlessness":

American Realism in its Anglo-European Contexts

Winfried Fluck

5 American Literary Naturalism

Christophe Den Tandt

6 American Regionalism: Local Color, National Literature,Global Circuits

June Howard

7 Women Authors and the Roots of American Modernism

Linda Wagner-Martin

8 The Short Story and the Short-Story Sequence, 1865-1914

J. Gerald Kennedy

PART II Contexts and Themes

9 Ecological Narrative and Nature Writing

S. K. Robisch

10 "The Frontier Story": The Violence of Literary History

Christine Bold

11 Native American Narratives: Resistance and Survivance

Gerald Vizenor

12 Representing the Civil War and Reconstruction: From Uncle Tom to Uncle Remus

Kathleen Diffley

13 Engendering the Canon: Women's Narratives, 1865-1914

Grace Farrell

14 Confronting the Crisis: African American Narratives

 Dickson D. Bruce, Jr.

15 Fiction's Many Cities

Sidney H. Bremer

16 Mapping the Culture of Abundance: Literary Narratives and Consumer Culture

Sarah Way Sherman

17 Secrets of the Master's Deed Box: Narrative and Class

Christopher P. Wilson

18 Ethnic Realism

Robert M. Dowling

19 Darwin, Science, and Narrative

Bert Bender

20 Writing in the "Vulgar Tongue": Law and American Narrative

William E. Moddelmog

21 Planning Utopia

Thomas Peyser

22 American Children's Narrative as Social Criticism, 1865-1914

Gwen Athene Tarbox

PART III Major Authors

23 An Idea of Order at Concord: Soul and Society in the Mind of Louisa May Alcott

John Matteson

24 America Can Break Your Heart: On the Significance of Mark Twain

Robert Paul Lamb

25 William Dean Howells and the Bourgeois Quotidian: Affection, Skepticism, Disillusion

Michael Anesko

26 Henry James in a New Century

John Carlos Rowe

27 Toward a Modernist Aesthetic: The Literary Legacy of Edith Wharton

Candace Waid and Clare Colquitt

28 Sensations of Style: The Literary Realism of Stephen Crane

William E. Cain

29 Theodore Dreiser and the Force of the Personal

Clare Virginia Eby

Index