Fictions of progress: Realism in the age of reform, 1900--1915

Fictions of Progress examines the intersection of reform movements and literary realism during the Progressive era. Reform movements were often promoted and supported through appeals to reality, a rhetorical strategy that gained greater currency with the rise of literary realism. In turn literary realist texts were shaped by reform movements. With each text I examine, a realist aesthetic grounded in experience and a scientific framework serves to validate a call for reform. In their various bids to persuade people to change society, literary realists framed their calls for reform in terms of material or natural urgency. They placed their calls for reform in a scientific context, appealing less to human morality than they did to new ideas about human nature. They sought answers to the questions of human nature in the modern disciplines of psychology, sociology, scientific management, statistics, progressive educational theory, and food science. These emerging disciplines provided the writers I examine with new a new vocabulary, a new set of tropes for understanding the nature of modern reality and how to manage or control that reality under the sign of reform. Although these writers are united by their appeal to reality, their works embody different accounts of the nature of that reality. Realist texts are inflected in radically different ways by the specific disciplinary vocabularies they invoke. Each disciplinary vocabulary entails a different set of assumptions about reality and how best to apprehend it.