SOURCE: Shi, David E. “Realism and the Social Question.” In Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture, 1850-1920, pp. 181-211. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Shi discusses the treatment of social and economic issues in American Realist fiction.

Signs of social strain pervaded the end of the nineteenth century. Popular theories of racial superiority and fears of foreign radicalism and social degeneration gave rise to a virulent strain of Anglo-Saxon nativism. In the South a vicious new tide of racism spilled over the region as states passed Jim Crow laws and white mobs lynched blacks in record numbers. Meanwhile, in New England and along the West coast, waves of “new” immigrants from eastern Europe and Asia broke against the cliffs of nativist anxiety. The flood of new “aliens,” Senator Henry Cabot Lodge predicted, threatened “a great and perilous change in the very fabric of...