New Essays on The Rise of Silas Lapham

The American Novel

by Donald E. Pease (Editor)

The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) established William Dean Howells's reputation in the annals of American literature. This collection of essays argues the renewed importance of Howells's novel for an understanding of literature as social force as well as a literary form. In his introduction Donald Pease recounts the fall and rise of the novel's value in literary history, outlines the various critical responses to Silas Lapham, and then restores Silas Lapham to its social context. The essays that follow expand on this theme, challenging the accepted views of literary critics by explicating narrative methods and the genre of literary realism. Focusing much of its attention on economics of morality, manners, and pain, as well as the marketplace, the volume as a whole argues that a relationship exists between Howells's realism and its socioeconomic context.

Hardcover

First published May 31, 1991

About the author

Donald E. Pease is the Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities, Chair of the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies Program, and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. He is an Americanist, literary and cultural critic, and academic. Pease directs the annual Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth.

Pease is an authority on 19th- and 20th-century American literature and literary theory and the founder and director of the Futures of American Studies Institute. Besides writing numerous books, Pease has written over 100 articles on figures in American and British literature and is the editor of The New Americanist series.