Writing against Reform : Aesthetic Realism in the Progressive Era

Throughout the Progressive Era, reform literature became a central feature of the American literary landscape.

Works like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” and Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives topped bestseller lists and jolted middle-class readers into action. While realism and social reform have a long-established relationship, prominent writers of the period such as Henry James, Edith Wharton, James Weldon Johnson, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Kate Chopin resisted explicit political rhetoric in their own works and critiqued reform aesthetics, which too often rang hollow.

Arielle Zibrak reveals that while these writers were often seen as indifferent to the political currents of their time, they actively engaged in reform work in their private lives.

Examining the critique of reform aesthetics within the tradition of American realist literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Writing against Reform promises to change the way we think about the fiction of this period and many of America’s leading writers.