Conscience and Purpose

"This work's originality resides in its resurrection of and careful, well-crafted response to the issue of social ethics and realistic practice in Howells. . . . Its readings are soundly argued, sensible, and convincing; they provide a refreshing look at works rarely considered together.--Donna M. Campbell, author of Resisting Regionalism: Gender and Naturalism in American Fiction, 1885-1915
Informed by postmodern deconstructions of authorial intent and textual referentiality, this book argues for reexamining writers who work to change the attitudes and extra-literary behavior of their readers. Petrie (Southern Connecticut State Univ.) characterizes William Dean Howells as the most influential exponent of a 'social-ethical aesthetic' that employs mimetic social representation to mediate among Americans fractured by capitalism, urbanization, and industrialization, and he examines works that enact, revise, and (in Cather's case) reject this agenda. The author asserts that the formal inconclusiveness of Howells's The Minister's Charge, Annie Kilburn, and The Vacation of the Kelwyns reveals the intractability of class privilege, even among those who have become painfully aware of it. Jewett moves beyond acute yet 'linear' social description of rural Maine to fashion an 'evocative, symbolic reader-participatory reading experience, ' in which the 'transcendent' merges with the material. In Conjure Woman, Chesnutt uses the interplay among his narrators to engage his audience in an indirect critique of contemporary American attitudes on race and to show the limits of such mediation. O Pioneers!, however, exemplifies Cather's use of regional material to serve a mythic-idealistic aesthetic. Though one might quibble with particular emphases, the book is well argued and nicely researched. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.
--CHOICE