American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract

American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract. By Brook Thomas. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. xiv, 359 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-520-20647-9.)

Brook Thomas's second volume examining relationships between legal and literary history, American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract, is an exciting, mind-engaging book. It complements his earlier work, Crossexaminations of Law and Literature (1987), in which Thomas concluded that pre-Civil War thinkers used contract to justify market inequities. However, he found that contractual implications in literary realism published between the mid-1880s and the early twentieth century held the promise of a distinctive social order.

Thomas contends that works by Henry James, William Dean Howells, and Mark Twain reflect Henry Maine's 1861 dictum that progressive societies move from status to contract. In traditional societies, individuals had socially determined obligations and roles, organized vertically around transcendental values, whether religious or moral. Contractual societies had a radically different approach.

Thomas insists that...