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From the late 1860s until her death in 1910, Rebecca Harding Davis was one of the best-known writers in America. She broke into print as a young woman in the 1860s with "Life in the Iron Mills," which established her as one of the pioneers of American realism. She developed a literary theory of the "commonplace" nearly two decades before William Dean Howels shaped his own version of the concept. Yet, in spite of her importance to the literary and popular culture of her time, she has been, for the most part, ignored by scholars. Rebecca Harding Davis and American Realism helps to change that.
Life in the Iron Hell “In the neighboring furnace-buildings lay great heaps of the refuse from the ore after the pig-metal is run. Korl we call it here: a light, porous substance, of a delicate, waxen, flesh-colored tinge. Out of the blocks of this korl, Wolfe, in his off-hours from the furnace, had a habit of chipping and moulding figures,—hideous, fantastic enough, but sometimes strangely beautiful: even the mill-men saw that, while they jeered at him. It was a curious fancy in the man, almost a passion.” - Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills Life in the Iron Mills is one of the first American novels that depicts the precarious state of the impoverished working class. ‘Molly Wolfe’ is a member of this class working 12 hours a day, six days a week to earn a living. Because of his condition, he cannot develop his innate artistic talent. His cousin, Deborah tries to help him but the consequences are devastating. Xist Publishing is a digital-first publisher. Xist Publishing creates books for the touchscreen generation and is dedicated to helping everyone develop a lifetime love of reading, no matter what form it takes
Rebecca Harding Davis was a prominent author of radical social fiction during the latter half of the nineteenth century. In stories that combine realism with sentimentalism, Davis confronted a wide range of contemporary American issues, giving voice to working women, prostitutes, wives seeking divorce, celibate utopians, and female authors. Davis broke down distinctions between the private and the public worlds, distinctions that trapped women in the ideology of domesticity.By engaging current strategies in literary hermeneutics with a strong sense of historical radicalism in the Gilded Age, Jean Pfaelzer reads Davis through the public issues that she forcefully inscribed in her fiction. In this study, Davis's realistic narratives actively construct a coherent social work, not in a fictional vacuum but in direct engagement with the explosive movements of social change from the Civil War through the turn of the century.
The ten stories gathered here show Rebecca Harding Davis to be an acute observer of the conflicts and ambiguities of a divided nation and position her as a major transitional writer between romanticism and realism. Instead of focusing on major Civil War conflicts and leaders, she takes readers into the intimate battles fought on family farms and backwoods roads.
Gale Researcher Guide for: Rebecca Harding Davis's Social Realism is selected from Gale's academic platform Gale Researcher. These study guides provide peer-reviewed articles that allow students early success in finding scholarly materials and to gain the confidence and vocabulary needed to pursue deeper research.
A Study Guide for Rebecca Harding Davis's "Life in the Iron Mills," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
Reading for Realism presents a new approach to U.S. literary history that is based on the analysis of dominant reading practices rather than on the production of texts. Nancy Glazener's focus is the realist novel, the most influential literary form of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries--a form she contends was only made possible by changes in the expectations of readers about pleasure and literary value. By tracing readers' collaboration in the production of literary forms, Reading for Realism turns nineteenth-century controversies about the realist, romance, and sentimental novels into episodes in the history of readership. It also shows how works of fiction by Rebecca Harding Davis, Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others participated in the debates about literary classification and reading that, in turn, created and shaped their audiences. Combining reception theory with a materialist analysis of the social formations in which realist reading practices circulated, Glazener's study reveals the elitist underpinnings of literary realism. At the book's center is the Atlantic group of magazines, whose influence was part of the cultural machinery of the Northeastern urban bourgeoisie and crucial to the development of literary realism in America. Glazener shows how the promotion of realism by this group of publications also meant a consolidation of privilege--primarily in terms of class, gender, race, and region--for the audience it served. Thus American realism, so often portrayed as a quintessentially populist form, actually served to enforce existing structures of class and power.