“EDITHA”—A (REALIST-IDEALIST) CRITIC’S STORY
“EDITHA”—A (REALIST-IDEALIST) CRITIC’S STORY

Summary/Abstract: Though one of William Dean Howells’s most frequently anthologized pieces, “Editha” may be said to have attracted rather sparse, meager scholarship and little critical attention. As “the father of American realism” himself showed, in both his life and work, a rather unusual contradiction between his critical (realist) thinking and the (idealist) “genteel tradition of his imaginative writing, this paper attempts to show that “Editha” was written more by the critic than the fiction writer, a fact that seems to be apparent in the deliberate and insistent focus on language as such, on “words,” the almost exaggerated intertextuality, the combination of realism and naturalism and romantic subjectivity, and even the choice of the title itself.

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