William Dean Howells

While he has never occupied the highest spot in the academic firmament, scholarship on William Dean Howells appears, perhaps surprisingly, to be in rude health. Academic work on the so-called “Dean of American Letters” has appeared at increasingly regular intervals in recent years. Though it would be wrong to make the mistake of those in the mid-twentieth century who optimistically declared a “Howells Revival” that turned out to be a mirage, an undeniable stream of excellent work has been quietly building up on Howells. This is, of course, in addition to the stand-out studies of a few decades ago by key figures including Walter Benn Michaels and Amy Kaplan. Most scholarly focus has been on Howells and realism, which is unsurprising given the pivotal role that Howells played in the “Realism Wars” of the 1880s and 1890s, his function as a mentor and patron to many other writers of his day, and his prominent position as editor of the Atlantic Monthly. Scholarship has tended to focus on Howells’s politics, sometimes exaggerating his role as defender of the Haymarket martyrs and erstwhile socialist, and at other times exaggerating his personal complicity with capitalism and defense of middle-class mores, especially sexual ones. Kaplan’s analysis has been particularly influential. However, recent scholarship has rejected her New Historicist paradigm of social and spatial containment. This turn is itself part of a move away from a “paranoid” hermeneutics of suspicion toward more reparative readings in literary studies more generally. Alternative approaches have developed that are informed by a wider literary turn to ideas of the global and transnational, as well as articles informed by ethical and philosophical methodologies. Exciting works have been produced in the twenty-first century within the realms of visual culture, periodical studies, legal studies, and anthropology. These works have also often moved away from the two realist novels that have dominated Howells scholarship for so long, taking a broader look at the breadth of his output, including his Altrurian romances.