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American Narratives: Multiethnic Writing in the Age of Realism.

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American Narratives: Multiethnic Writing in the Age of Realism. Molly Crumpton Winter. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007. 224 pages. $36.50 cloth.

During a recent class discussion of Stephen Crane's Maggie. A Girl of the Streets in my American realism course, a student asked whether there were any writers who countered what seemed to be the pervasively negative, and thus to him, unrealistic, depictions of the New York tenement inhabitants. His response raises larger questions about identity and representation. Whose work is included in the canon of American realism and why? As numerous literary critics have argued, the question of representation is significant in part because the inclusion of particular writers in the canon shapes the way in which literary history is portrayed and defined, and my student clearly wanted to know what residents of the New York tenements would have to say for themselves.

Like my student, Molly Crumpton Winter asks how including new voices in the canon would reshape our understanding of American literary realism. Building on the work of Elizabeth Ammons and others who envision a more expansive and multiethnic...

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