Beginning with Updike's Rabbit, Run, each chapter undertakes a close reading of one or more novels. Examining this pattern leads to an understanding of the cultural role and utility of the contemporary realist novel. Given the similarities between characters like Silas Lapham, George Babbitt, and Rabbit Angstrom, a pattern emerges of male characters being faced with their own moral shortcomings.
Realism must now respond to a more evolved readership, hence Howells's edict is even more imperative today-the realist novel must provide explorations of possible moral responses rather than limited didactic representations. In an effort to establish some parameters for the specific category of contemporary realism, I begin with an examination of Howells's arguments about the function and operation of realism at the beginning of the twentieth century. America has continued to read realist novels throughout the last century and into this one, and the cultural impact of this practice needs to be acknowledged and examined. In fact, American realism never went away, and its quiet evolution has culminated in a form of contemporary realism that resists the dismissive critiques of earlier forms. Other critics and historians, like Robert Rebein and Gordon Hutner, have argued that the revival of the short story and the minimalist movement in the eighties spurred a concurrent revival in realism.
Critiques like Amy Kaplan's Marxist indictment of class representations in the fiction of William Dean Howells have contributed to an overall contentment with the idea that realism had lost its significance in American literary culture. Rabbit Angstrom to Frank Bascombe: Troubled masculinity in contemporary American realismĪs a genre, American literary realism has historically taken a back seat to more critically attractive theoretical movements and organizational rubrics, such as Modernism and Postmodernism.
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