SOURCE: Budd, Louis J. “The American Background.” In The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism: Howells to London, edited by Donald Pizer, pp. 21-46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Budd examines the intellectual and historical background of realism and naturalism in America.

Introduction

Although realism and naturalism could have sprung up independently in the United States, the historical fact is that they flourished earlier in the European countries all the way eastward to Russia and that American writers were especially stimulated by British and French models. On the other hand, though a still provincial, moralizing culture might have rejected realism and naturalism as alien or profane or harmful, nevertheless they did become established in the postbellum United States. Even Richard Chase, whose The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957) had argued that the romance was the quintessential mode of fiction in the United States, felt...