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The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) established William Dean Howells's reputation in the annals of American literature. This collection of essays, first published in 1991, argues the renewed importance of Howells's novel for an understanding of literature as a social force as well as a literary form. In his introduction Donald Pease recounts the fall and rise of the novel's value in literary history, outlines the various critical responses to Silas Lapham, and restores the novel to its social context. The essays that follow expand on this theme, challenging the accepted views of literary critics by explicating narrative methods and the genre of literary realism. Focusing much of its attention on economics of morality, manners, and pain, as well as the marketplace, the volume as a whole argues that a relationship exists between Howells's realism and its socioeconomic context.

Male Sexuality under Surveillance is a lively, intelligent, and expertly argued analysis of the construction of male sexuality in the business office. Graham Thompson interweaves three main threads: a historicized cultural analysis of the development of the modern business office from its beginnings in the early nineteenth century to the present day, a Foucauldian discussion of the office as the site of various disciplinary practices, and a queer-theoretical discussion of the textualization of the gay male body as a device for producing a taxonomy of male-male relations. The combination of these themes produces a study that is fresh, insightful, and provocative.

The social novel ought not to be confused with didacticism in literature and ought not to be expected to provide prescriptions for the cure of social ills. Neither should it necessarily be viewed as ephemeral. After examining justifications of the social novel offered by William Dean Howells (in the 1880s) and Jonathan Franzen (in the 1990s), the author explores the way in which social novels alter perceptions and responses at levels of sensibility that are not usually susceptible to rational argument, push back moral horizons, contribute to the creation of social conscience, and expose the complexity and contextuality of moral discernment. As a concrete example, Howells's 1889 novel \"A Hazard of New Fortunes\" is analyzed (and defended against its detractors) in terms of its sophisticated treatment of the dilemmas that arise from a recognition of personal complicity in structural sin, its disclosure of the context-indexed evolution of values, and its attention to the importance and fragility of social trust.

Mr. [W. D. Howells] also stated that the subcommittee \"conceded a fence up to five-feet.\" Five feet was the legal limit, but the subcommittee did not concede that five-feet was appropriate nor desirable along the Old Santa Fe Trail.The minutes of this meeting will verify this.Of the five lots in question along the Old Santa Fe Trail, three are existing barb wire and one is a three-foot block wall. The H- Board approved a maximum height fence adjacent to the higher sections mentioned by W.D. Howells.Mr. Howells also failed to mention that the land drops off substantially toward OSFT and that the effective height of his fence when viewed from adjacent yards is much higher than the four feet recommended by the H-Board.

Our descendants will find nowhere so faithful and so pleasing a picture of our American existence, and no writer is likely to rival Mr. Howells in this idealization of the commonplace. The vein which Mr. Howells has struck is hardly a deep one. His dexterity in following it, and in drawing out its slightest resources, seems at times almost marvellous, a perpetual succession of feats of sleight-of-hand, all the more remarkable because the critical reader alone will understand how difficult such feats are, and how much tact and wit is needed to escape a mortifying failure.–Henry Adams, The North American Review, 1872William Dean Howells was not the first novelist to understand the critical possibilities inherent in the realistic novel; he had learned much from his European predecessors in the style. His claim to fame, however, rests upon his having been an American who chose to bring these possibilities to bear upon uniquely American materials at a time when, as the critics would have it, the norms of Puritan and genteel literature, of the romance, were no longer adequate to portraying the new world of the post–Civil War United States. Newton Arvin once gave voice to this way of judging Howells when he wrote in The New Republic thathe was the first of our important imaginative writers thoughtfully to consider and intelligently to comprehend what was happening to the form and quality of American life as it moved away from the simplicity, the social fluidity, the relative freedoms, of the mid-century toward the ugly disharmonies of monopolism and empire.

Like houses, novels have proper entranceways intended by the author as the way into the fiction that follows, and like an architect, the author designs those licensed openings for maximum aesthetic effect, so as to lure us into the narrative structure beyond. That linear interior is likewise an arrangement laid out so as to enhance the experience of encounter, and it subjoins the entranceway as a complex instrument of authorial control. Entering a novel by means of the first word, sentence, chapter, and proceeding along the intended corridor is a convention basic to the act of fiction, but it is a route like that found in a carefully planned theme park, managed by the controlling intelligence so as to exercise full aesthetic authority. But should the reader get into the narrative by another, unintended opening, then quite a different route is followed and a different experience may be obtained, one controlled not by the author-architect but by the reader as explorer of forbidden spaces.The kind of opening I am describing provides access not to the narrative but to the workings of the narrative, the infrastructure that lies within the story by means of which the author leads us. Moreover, by gaining access to the infrastructure, by discovering the way the novel has been designed to work, we can often gain access to the author as well. The Rise of Silas Lapham provides a convenient (but by no means unique) example, for we know that the writing of this novel coincided with something close to a nervous breakdown experienced by Howells, that its carefully worked out social drama seems to have put a great strain on the author in order to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion.

The Rise of Silas Lapham has always been and surely will continue to be William Dean Howells's most available work, the work that connects him to the larger world of readers. There are of course other Howells novels that will be candidates for the position. Some will claim the earlier A Modern Instance as the essential Howells; others will find in the later A Hazard of New Fortunes a gravity of social consciousness that gives the novel a weight lacking in the earlier work. In light of Howells's voluminous production, minority candidates will inevitably be advanced. Some few will opt for Annie Kilburn or The Minister's Charge; and there will no doubt be a few who enter pleas for The Son of Royal Langbrith or The Landlord at Lion's Head. Then too there will be advocates for Indian Summer as evidence that Howells could hold his own with James in the international scene. Lionel Trilling went so far as to single out The Vacation of the Kelwyns as an example of his resilient strength. Yet anyone reflecting upon Howells's fate knows that none of these minority candidates – not even A Modern Instance or A Hazard of New Fortunes – will ever challenge the preeminence of The Rise of Silas Lapham.There was a time, even in my memory, when The Rise of Silas Lapham was standard reading in the high schools of the land. It represented American literature in novel form just as Silas Marner represented English literature.

Miss Greensfelder felt the same way about her daily life. It is why we read \"The Rise of [SILAS LAPHAM].\" Though she didn't preach, it was clear - especially to those of us who did well in school - that she expected us to be both wordly successes and good. But by successful, she did not mean making a lot of money - or any for that matter. She meant civilized. By good; she meant what Silas Lapham and [W. D. Howells] meant. Silas, you'll remember, did make a lot of money out of his paint, and moved to Boston, and began building a house on the same side of Beacon street as the [Oliver Wendell Holmes] house. By this act he and his family revealed their desire to be successful. Then followed the twofold reversals in love and fortune. There is a tragic mix-up over the daughter's marriage, and Silas fails in business. These calamities are his occasion for being good. As if this were not enough, on the very last pages of the novel Howells puts Silas through the very same test once more with yet another property. He again refuses to take a \"legal\" profit. Clearly Silas Lapham does not believe in caveat emptor, nor does he think business consists of buying cheap and selling dear