U.S. historians have long considered the Civil War and its Reconstruction as a second American revolution. Literary scholars, however, have yet to show how fully these years revolutionized the American imagination. One marker of this was the postwar search for a “Great American Novel”—a novel fully adequate to the breadth and diversity of the United States in the era of the Fourteenth Amendment. The debate over what full representation would mean led to a thoroughgoing reconstruction of the meaning of “literature” for readers, writers, politics, and law. Legal Realisms examines the transformation of the idea of “realism” in literature and beyond in the face of uneven developments in the racial, ethnic, gender, and class structure of American society. The ideal of equality before the law conflicted with persistent inequality, and it was called into question by changing ideas about accurate representation and the value of cultural difference within the visual arts, philosophy, law, and political and moral theory. Offering provocative new readings of Mark Twain, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Helen Hunt Jackson, Albion Tourgée, and others, Legal Realisms follows the novel through the worlds of California Native American removal and the Reconstruction-era South, of the Mississippi valley and the urban Northeast. It shows how incomplete emancipation haunted the celebratory pursuit of a literature of national equality and explores the way novelists’ representation of the difficulty of achieving equality before the law helped Americans articulate the need for a more robust concept of society.

In 1890, the regionalist writer Hamlin Garland used the word “modernism” to describe his own aesthetic project, apparently becoming the first American writer to claim this label. This paper explores the implications of Garland’s historically early usage for understanding the emergence of American modernism. It argues that a number of aspects of Garland’s writing—his exploration of symbolism, his interest in women’s experience and his celebration of female rebellion, his interest in fragmentary forms, and his focus on the modernity of provincial American life—define points of articulation between regionalism and modernism, American provincialism and an American avant-garde.

Modernism’s Others explores how a transformation in traditions of realist representation laid the grounds for the emergence of the multicultural and avant-garde constructions of modern American literature. At the heart of this investigation is the way the “right to privacy” articulated at the end of the nineteenth century reshaped visions of separate spheres, differential rights, and public duties. It examines a moment at which writers placed, at the heart of literature’s ethics and its epistemology, the right to not be known. Tracing the career of this idea from its roots in late nineteenth-century realism through the emerging canons of modernist and multicultural literature, this project explores the interplay between new categories of legal right, new categories of social analysis, and new measures of literary value. “Selling somebody out” slouches into American literature, more or less, on the heels of Bartley Hubbard.

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