SOURCE: Habegger, Alfred. “Realism.” In Gender, Fantasy, and Realism in American Literature, pp. 103-12. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

In the following essay, Habegger discusses American Realism not as an independent form, but as a reaction against women's fiction of the mid-nineteenth century.

What was realism, exactly? Up to this point I've assumed that we share a rough sense of what it was. If the reader has followed my contentions without any uneasiness over what I understand by realism, then all is well; there is communality. But if there is only uneasiness, then it is high time I admit that I have adhered all along to René Wellek's description of realism as “the objective representation of contemporary social reality.”¹ Wellek offers this formula as a period concept, strictly appropriate to nineteenth-century European and American literature. With the proviso that there is no reason for not generalizing the concept...