With Malice toward Quite a Few

Increased scholarly attention is now being paid to the depiction of intercultural relations in American literature across all periods. The books examined in this review article contribute importantly to this body of work, paying particular, though not exclusive, attention to realist fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Henry Wonham and Mary Esteve demonstrate, we find embedded within realist literary works sometimes blatantly obvious, sometimes teasingly oblique, representations of racial minorities, women, and immigrants that are most often malicious in intent and inevitably invidious in consequence. Also investigating the depiction of intercultural relations—though focusing on affirmations of cosmopolitanism in American regional literature from 1850 to 1930—Tom Lutz tenders a more sanguine reading of the realist tradition, finding within it reverberations of a democratic sensibility that is, in his view, inalienably American and indeed the very hallmark of American literature

Aesthetics · American literature · Art · Cosmopolitanism · Depiction · Literature · Malice · Political science · Politics · Reading (process · Realism · Sociology · American History and Culture · Anarchism and Radical Politics · History · Law · Philosophy · Race, History, and American Society

• Lynching and Spectacle

  Christopher Waldrep•American Nineteenth Century History•2009

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