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Turning the Corner: Romance as Economic Critique in Norris's Trilogy of Wheat and Du Bois's The Quest of the Silver Fleece

Turning the Corner: Romance as Economic Critique in Norris's Trilogy of Wheat and Du... Turning the Corner Romance as Economic Critique in Norris’s Trilogy of Wheat and Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece Gina M. Rossetti, Saint Xavier University In his essay “A Plea for Romantic Fiction” (1901), Frank Norris famous- ly defends the romance against those who confl ate it with sentimental- ism and argues that the former is not the “conjurer’s trick box . . . meant only to amuse,” but rather romance is the “instrument with which we may go straight through clothes and tissues and wrappings of fl esh down deep into the red living heart of things” (1165). Such a defi nition not only defends and elevates the romance, but it also opens up and re-imagines naturalism, which has normally been considered this probing instrument used for the examination of the material and cultural forces that act upon individuals. How romance comes to be an instrument of social examina- tion and critique and the effect of such an approach on conventional defi - nitions of naturalism is an issue I will explore by placing Norris’s unfi n- ished Trilogy of Wheat (The Octopus, 1900; The Pit, 1902) in conversation with W. E. B. Du Bois’s novel http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Studies in American Naturalism University of Nebraska Press

Turning the Corner: Romance as Economic Critique in Norris's Trilogy of Wheat and Du Bois's The Quest of the Silver Fleece

Studies in American Naturalism , Volume 7 (1) – Jan 20, 2013

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Publisher
University of Nebraska Press
ISSN
1944-6519

Abstract

Turning the Corner Romance as Economic Critique in Norris’s Trilogy of Wheat and Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece Gina M. Rossetti, Saint Xavier University In his essay “A Plea for Romantic Fiction” (1901), Frank Norris famous- ly defends the romance against those who confl ate it with sentimental- ism and argues that the former is not the “conjurer’s trick box . . . meant only to amuse,” but rather romance is the “instrument with which we may go straight through clothes and tissues and wrappings of fl esh down deep into the red living heart of things” (1165). Such a defi nition not only defends and elevates the romance, but it also opens up and re-imagines naturalism, which has normally been considered this probing instrument used for the examination of the material and cultural forces that act upon individuals. How romance comes to be an instrument of social examina- tion and critique and the effect of such an approach on conventional defi - nitions of naturalism is an issue I will explore by placing Norris’s unfi n- ished Trilogy of Wheat (The Octopus, 1900; The Pit, 1902) in conversation with W. E. B. Du Bois’s novel

Journal

Studies in American NaturalismUniversity of Nebraska Press

Published: Jan 20, 2013

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