Abstract: In this introduction to our special issue, we discuss the strange career of the American novel at the turn of the twentieth century, which has repeatedly fallen in and out of critical favor often because of entrenched binaries—romance versus realism, aesthetics versus politics, form versus history—that have distorted assessments of its achievements. Tracing the changing fortunes of the period’s literature from Henry James’s contemporaneous evaluation through Cold War criticism and New Historicism to a recent and troubling ebb in attention, we contend that the American novel of this transitional moment is best understood through historically grounded formal analysis. The essays collected here, summarized briefly in the latter half of this introduction, demonstrate how unjustly neglected fin-de-siècle novels negotiate democracy, agency, and power through a striking hybridity of genre, revealing contradiction and tension not as a weakness but as a defining strength.
Walker et al. (Sun,) studied this question.