Romance and Reality in the 1850s and Beyond

This coda studies the romances of the 1850s and postbellum realist novels, charting the terms on which fictionists would come to ignore the fictionality of fiction—an oversight unimaginable for writers in the early republic. It shows how, across the second half of the century, the issue of fictionality gradually disappears from discussions to which it had once been fundamental, such as the long-standing debates about the relationship between “reality” and “romance.” By the turn of the twentieth century, fictionality is no longer considered a problem. The late nineteenth century's cultivated indifference to fictionality ultimately proves the most influential response to the problem of fictionality. For some postbellum writers, ignoring the question of fictionality was a strategy for establishing the cultural authority of their fictions. But while this strategic inattention to the fictionality of fiction might begin as a self-conscious means of affirming the seriousness of fiction, it gradually becomes a conventionalized, rarely noticed feature of the novel genre.