Table of Contents:
  • From the natural to the urban sublime
  • Critical reassessments of American realism and naturalism
  • The limits of urban realism : William Dean Howells's A hazard of new fortunes
  • Sublime horizons, vitalist mysteries : Theodore Dreiser's naturalist metropolis
  • Domus versus megalopolis : local and global epistemologies of the city
  • The discovery of the urban market : Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie
  • Sublime (re)production : Frank Norris's The octopus and The pit
  • Pastoralism reconstructed : Jack London's Valley of the moon
  • The "common lot" of 1890s and 1900s realism : middle-class responses to the metropolis
  • Naturalist gothic : population economics and urban genealogies
  • The politics of hypnotic persuasion
  • Overcivilization and the crisis of writerly manhood
  • Naturalist gothic and the regeneration of artistic identity
  • On the threshold of the metropolis : the construction of naturalist bohemia.