Revisionist Approaches to American Realism and Naturalism. Ed. Jutta Ernst, Sabina Matter-Seibel, Klaus H. Schmidt (American Studies – A Monograph Series, 284). Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2018.

In the last three decades or so there has been a powerful revival of critical interest in a literary phenomenon which had been held in low estimation in the post-World-War-II years. In the wake of new theoretical paradigms such as post-structuralism, New Historicism, Bourdieu’s field theory, multiculturalism, culture and gender studies, American realism and naturalism have become the object of various revisionist efforts. The present (slightly extended) post-conference volume is an expression of and reaction to that trend. Following the editors’ informative introduction, the volume opens with Winfried Fluck’s excellent analysis of the critical debate from its nineteenthcentury beginnings up to the present. The article offers an incisive critique of various approaches and their epistemological premises and political biases, demonstrating among others how the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ underlying the ideology-critical methods that emerged under the impact of the ‘cultural radicalism’ of the 1960s tends to lead to sweeping denunciations without regard to the individual shape of the texts in question.