Abstract

This study extends and develops Georg Lukacs' mature literary theory with respect to American realism. Chapter I surveys previous general studies, beginning with V. L. Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought. I compare Parrington's lack of an adequate theory of realism to similar limitations of the work of Granville Hicks and V. F. Calverton, the two most prominent early-twentieth-century American Marxist critics. All of these critics failed to distinguish rigorously between realism, naturalism and romance. I argue that Georg Lukacs' theory of realism, developed during the early 1930s but unavailable to American critics, provided for the possibility of such a distinction. ;The remainder of Chapter I measures the consequences of Lukacs' lack of an American readership. Since the decline of sociohistorical criticism after 1940, U.S. literary scholarship has been dominated by ahistorical formalism. By analyzing representative works of Erich Auerbach and Rene Wellek, I demonstrate that postwar formalism further obscured the representational problems posed by fictional realism. Through discussions of the work of Kenneth Burke and Fredric Jameson, I show that the dominance of formalism and idealism over the work of recent critics vitiates their efforts to revive materialist criticism. ;Chapters II through IV provides a systematic response to the methodological problems discussed in Chapter I. Chapter II examines the fictional work of James Fenimore Cooper, especially the Leatherstocking Tales, and elaborates on Lukacs' brief discussion of these texts in The Historical Novel. I argue that Cooper's importance as a historical realist has been obscured by the formalist tradition of "myth criticism." ;Chapter III analyzes the fiction of William Dean Howells, from Their Wedding Journey through A Hazard of New Fortunes. I argue that Howells represented a similar transition in American culture to that represented by Tolstoy in Lukacs' analysis. ;Chapter IV discusses John Dos Passos' efforts to revive historical fiction through using and surpassing the methods of literary naturalism and modernism. I argue that in his masterpiece, U.S.A., Dos Passos transcended the limits imposed by late-bourgeois literary trends, thereby approaching, though not fully achieving, a new form of realism adequate to a new stage of American social history