SOURCE: Barrish, Phillip. “William Dean Howells and the Roots of Realist Taste.” In American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige, 1880-1995, pp. 16-47. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

In the following essay, Barrish discusses the manner in which Howells's fiction contributed to the development of the realist aesthetic.

Realist Taste Versus Philistinism

In the course of well-known critic James Cox's contribution to a 1991 collection of New Essays on The Rise of Silas Lapham, he makes a more-or-less parenthetic remark about the vernacular aspect of the book's protagonist: “Indeed there has always been a sense among cultivated readers of dialect that Lapham, in his swagger as well as in his speech rhythms, actually seems more Western than Northeastern.”¹ While I do not wish to enter into the question of Western versus Northeastern swagger and speech rhythms, I do want to call attention to the group that Cox's comment both...