Throughout the Progressive Era, reform literature became a central feature of the American literary landscape. Works like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” and Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives topped bestseller lists and jolted middle-class readers into action.

While realism and social reform have a long-established relationship, prominent writers of the period such as Henry James, Edith Wharton, James Weldon Johnson, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Kate Chopin resisted explicit political rhetoric in their own works and critiqued reform aesthetics, which too often rang hollow. Arielle Zibrak reveals that while these writers were often seen as indifferent to the political currents of their time, their work is a part of a little explored debate on the relationship between literature and politics at the heart of Progressive Era publishing. Examining the critique of reform aesthetics within the tradition of American realist literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Writing Against Reform promises to change the way we think about the fiction of this period and many of America’s leading writers.

ARIELLE ZIBRAK is associate professor of English at the University of Wyoming and author of Avidly Reads Guilty Pleasures.

“Writing Against Reform is an engagingly written and persuasively argued piece of scholarship that is a pleasure to read. This is the work of a scholar widely and comfortably knowledgeable in her field of study, and a model of how scholarship should be done: deeply researched, coherently reasoned, and always eloquent.”—María Carla Sánchez, author of Reforming the World: Social Activism and the Problem of Fiction in Nineteenth-Century America

“An engrossing and compelling study, Writing Against Reform uses an impressive range of references and thorough understanding of publishing and social contexts to offer a convincing argument that is as satisfying as it is provocative.”—Keith Newlin, author of Hamlin Garland: A Life