The Civil War, Reconstruction and the post-war Amendments revolutionized American intellectual life, compelling new discussions of inequality and difference. Legal Realisms explores how a new kind of American novel emerged in relation to contemporary...
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The Civil War, Reconstruction and the post-war Amendments revolutionized American intellectual life, compelling new discussions of inequality and difference. Legal Realisms explores how a new kind of American novel emerged in relation to contemporary aesthetic, legal, and political debates about the meaning of social representation in literature and public life. Cover -- Legal Realisms -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. The Novel in the Era of Plessy -- 1. When Is a Novelist Not a Novelist? The Case of Harriet Beecher Stowe -- 2. Realism and Realisms in Nineteenth-Century American Literature -- 3. The Sentimental Public, Social Despair, and the Problem of "Concealment" -- 4. William James between the Rationality of Sentiment and the Sentiment of Rationality: Knowing and Feeling in a Residual Formation -- 5. What Henry James Knew: Concealment as the Novel's Knowledge -- 6. Plessy v. Ferguson and the Limits of the Law's Knowledge -- 7. Albion Tourgée among the Sentimental Fools: The Cruel Humor of de jure Equality -- 8. From Sympathy to Society: Realism in an Age of Incomplete Emancipation -- 2. Perfect Knowledge: Sympathetic Realism between the Rational and the Real -- 1. A Bleeding Heart Reads Ramona Straight -- 2. Helen Hunt Jackson's Will to Believe -- 3. The Poncas, Public Sentiment, and the Right to Have Rights -- 4. The Legal Realism of A Century of Dishonor -- 5. The Hope for Scandal Proves a Stumbling Block -- 6. Traveling Saleswoman for Native Rights -- 7. Realism in the Venice of Prodigal Sons: Twain, James, and Howells -- 8. Mugwump Aestheticism: The Relativism of Virtue -- 9. The Picturesque of Genocide in the Century -- 10. Ramona and the Fracturing of Sentimental Universalism -- 11. Failures -- 3. Imperfect Knowledge: William Dean Howells, Perspectival Realism, and Social Politics -- 1. Howells, Sentimental and Modern -- 2. Howells's West: Arcadia, Utopia, Exile -- 3. Sentimental Alienation and the Zeitschriftsteller -- 4. "Andenken": Speaking in Code from Heinrich Heine to John Brown -- 5. Venice: The Patriot in Exile, the Tourist in Everyday Life.
