Daily Dose

From Love & Death in the American Novel, by Leslie Fielder

IMPOSITION

"For too long, historians of American fiction have mistakenly tried to impose on the course of a brief literary history a notion of artistic 'progress' imported from France, or more precisely perhaps, from certain French literary critics. Such historians have been pleased to speak of 'The Rise of Realism' or 'The Triumph of Realism,' as if the experiments of Hawthorne or Poe or Melville were half-misguided fumblings toward the final excellence of William Dean Howells!"

From the Preface