SOURCE: Kimball, William J. “Realism in Sidney Lanier's “Tiger-Lilies.” South Atlantic Bulletin 36, no. 2 (1971): 17-20.

In the following essay, Kimball reads Lanier's only novel, Tiger-Lilies, for its realism, arguing that had Lanier's use of realism been more consistent, the novel would have been more effective and more successful.

Although Tiger-Lilies has been referred to as a Civil War novel, it can hardly meet the qualifications of that genre. It is concerned in part with accounts of some of Lanier's experiences in the war. But it is concerned with other things, too. When it appeared in 1867 critics were “baffled or smothered by the jumble of its contents, by the disquisitions, by the digressions, by the oddity or strain of phrasing or fancy, by the literary allusions, by the music and musical talk, by the intrusions of the author,” and by what has been called the “tropical luxuriousness of beauties.”¹ Yet...