American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige, 1880–1995

Abstract

Focusing on key works of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literary realism, Phillip Barrish traces the emergence of new ways of gaining intellectual prestige - that is, new ways of gaining cultural recognition as unusually intelligent, sensitive or even wise. Through extended readings of works by Henry James, William Dean Howells, Abraham Cahan and Edith Wharton, Barrish emphasises the differences between literary realist modes of intellectual and cultural authority and those associated with the rise of the social sciences. In doing so, he greatly refines our understanding of the complex relationship between realist writing and masculinity. Barrish further argues that understanding the dynamics of intellectual status in realist literature provides new analytic purchase on intellectual prestige in recent critical theory. Here he focuses on such figures as Lionel Trilling, Paul de Man, John Guillory and Judith Butler.

The lures of neo‐Victorianism presentism (with a feminist case study ofPenny Dreadful)

“…As early as 2001, Christian Gutleben stressed the revisionist impact of 20th‐century political correctness on the period's fictional reconstructions, producing retributive denouncements of “the injustice towards some of its ill‐used or forgotten representatives such as women, the lower classes or homosexuals” (Gutleben, , p. 10). It is almost as though the Victorians' own representations of their 19th‐century world and its material traces cannot be relied upon to tell it ‘as it really was’ and must be imaginatively supplemented with modern‐day insight and greater frankness to produce a ‘realer’ disclosure of the period, warts and all—what Phillip Barrish (albeit in different context) calls “the realest real thing” (Barrish, , p. 3), “the really real” (4) and “‘realer‐than‐thou’ one‐upmanship” (4) . This implicitly positions neo‐Victorian artists and audiences as freer from ideological blind spots and hence superior (because more clear‐sighted or less benighted) cultural critics of the 19th century than the Victorians themselves.…”

“…Barrish applies the terms to an “almost entirely middle class” (Barrish, , p. 4) strand of American literary realism from 1880 to 1995, which sought to establish its “intellectual prestige” (1) by claiming to convey truer insights than scientific, empirical, and statistical studies could provide into radically disparate lives, including those of the working classes, immigrants, and abject poor. A comparable imaginative projection—along temporal rather than class lines—is discernible in neo‐Victorianism, even when writers opt for non‐realist modes such as the Gothic.…”

Barthes for Barthes' Sake? Victorian Literature and Photography beyond Poststructuralism

“…Kaplan's view is that realism is not a reflection of social reality but is actually involved in its creation. We can add to this by noting that what unites literary realists is a concern for what Phillip Barrish calls ‘whatever category of experience a given literary work posits as the most recalcitrantly real , most intransigently material , that life has to offer’. Literary realists search out different forms of experience in an attempt to be ‘ “realer‐than‐thou” ’, as Barrish neatly puts it (4).…”

Manacled to Identity: Cosmopolitanism, Class, and ‘The Culture Concept’ in Stephen Crane

“…By the 1880s, many authors and readers had begun to define authorial skill in social-scientific and bio-evolutionary terms through the capacity to realistically render the particularities of group-based differences and their adaptation to environment (Barrish, 2001;Elliott, 2002). For this practice to operate, realists had to be sufficiently versed in the particularities of dialect and behaviour specific to regions and locales.…”