Pain and the Aesthetics of US Literary Realism

The postbellum period saw many privileged Americans pursuing a civilized ideal premised on insulation from pain. Medico-scientific advances in anesthetics and analgesics and emergent religious sects like Christian Science made pain avoidance seem newly possible. The upper classes could increasingly afford to distance themselves from the suffering they claimed to feel more exquisitely than did their supposedly less refined contemporaries and antecedents. The five USliterary realists examined in this study resisted this contemporary revulsion from pain without going so far as to join those who celebrated suffering for its invigorating effects. William Dean Howells, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, and Charles Chesnutt embraced the concept of a heightenedsensitivity to pain as a consequence of the civilizing process but departed from their peers by delineating alternative definitions of a superior sensibility indebted to suffering. Although the treatment of pain in other influential nineteenth century literary modes including sentimentalism and naturalism has attracted ample scholarly attention, this book offers the first sustained analysis of pain's importance to US literary realism as practiced by five of its most influentialproponents.

Cynthia J. Davis is a Professor of English and an Associate Dean at the University of South Carolina. She specializes in US literature from the Civil War to World War II, with emphases in medical humanities, literary history, and gender studies. Her essays have appeared in such journals as American Literature, American Literary History, and Arizona Quarterly. Her other books include a study of the influence of medicine on American Literature from1845 to 1915 (Stanford, 2000) and a biography of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Stanford, 2010).