Cynthia J. Davis, Pain and the Aesthetics of US Literary Realism

Literary realism, famously de ned by William Dean Howells as "nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material," has long been associated with an exacting a ention to surface detail and a concern with the manners and mores of middleclass life.That de nition is enhanced and complicated in a new book by Cynthia Davis, which argues that realist authors also shared an interest in pain.They were not simply concerned with describing the external world and the activities of its bourgeois denizens, but rather the subjective experience of su ering and how it might recalibrate perception and self-understanding.Pain and the Aesthetics of Literary Realism is organized around readings of individual authors, the rst three chapters devoted to the Howells, Edith Wharton, and the James siblings, Alice, Henry, and William, and two additional chapters on Mark Twain and Charles Chesnu , whose work Davis calls "curious realism" (17).At a moment when the dominant culture was bent on the eradication of pain, realist literature confronted it, seeing it as a conduit to heightened consciousness, and, in the case of the la er two authors, awareness of, and even action to ameliorate, the su ering of less fortunate others.