In the early 1800s, American critics warned about the danger of literature as a
distraction from reality. Later critical accounts held that American literature during the
antebellum period was idealistic and that literature grew more realistic after the horrors of
the Civil War. By focusing on three leading American authors-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman,
and Emily Dickinson-Reading Reality challenges that analysis.
Thomas Finan
reveals how antebellum authors used words such as "real" and "reality" as
key terms for literary discourse and claimed that the "real" was, in fact, central to
their literary enterprise. He argues that for many Americans in the early nineteenth century,
the "real" was often not synonymous with the physical world. It could refer to the
spiritual, the sincere, or the individual's experience. He further explains how this
awareness revises our understanding of the literary and conceptual strategies of American
writers.
By unpacking antebellum senses of the "real," Finan casts
new light on the formal traits of the period's literature, the pressures of the literary
marketplace in nineteenth-century America, and the surprising possibilities of literary
reading.