front cover of Field Observations
Field Observations
Stories
Stories by Rob Davidson
University of Missouri Press, 2001

Field Observations, the debut fiction collection from Rob Davidson, contains stories about people who find themselves at difficult turning points in their lives—times when they are faced with hard choices, broken promises, and the fear of self-destruction. Davidson's characters are diverse: a retired math teacher, an auto repair worker, a technical writer, a nurse living overseas. What connects them is the way Davidson renders each character with essential human dignity, regardless of his or her flaws. This collection addresses such contemporary concerns as love relationships, cultural interaction, divorce, aging, and alcoholism in a lively, sometimes offbeat way.

In "Inventory"—winner of a 1997 AWP Intro Journals Award—the young narrator, fresh out of the army, struggles to take stock of his civilian life and assume responsibility for himself. An estranged wife, in "You Have to Say Something," competes for attention with her husband's manic approach to work, finding both solace and frustration in a new friend, a compulsive gift-giver. "A Private Life" renders a young Peace Corps volunteer grappling with her loneliness in a foreign country, with a sense of exposure and violation. In "What We Leave Behind," a college dropout and onetime golf prodigy finds himself dissatisfied with his current career as a vacuum cleaner salesman; after a quirky encounter with a client, he finds hope for a new beginning.

A recurrent motif in the stories is the presentation of characters who either tend to observe, even spy on, others, or who have the sense that they themselves are being watched. The notion of a passive observer extends to several characters who seem to treat their own lives as subject for observation rather than action, frequently persisting in patterns of behavior that are clearly destructive.

Rendered in clean, smooth prose with sharply observed details and driven by Davidson's fine ear for dialogue, these stories poignantly capture the difficult in-between states that trouble people every day. Fully defined and evocatively written, this collection addresses important real-life issues and concerns.

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front cover of The Master and the Dean
The Master and the Dean
The Literary Criticism of Henry James and William Dean Howells
Rob Davidson
University of Missouri Press, 2005
Henry James (1843–1916) and William Dean Howells (1837–1920) are best known for the central roles they played as nineteenth-century American novelists, penning such classics as James’s Portrait of a Lady and Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham. Their importance as literary critics, however, has been underplayed for decades. Although certain aspects of James’s and Howells’s criticism have been carefully considered—James’s “Prefaces” and Howells’s Criticism and Fiction, for example—no scholar has previously undertaken a comprehensive comparative study of their respective critical oeuvres. In The Master and the Dean, Rob Davidson presents the first book-length study of James’s literary criticism to be published since the early 1980s and the first-ever book-length study of Howells’s criticism. Considering Howells’s commonly accepted position among scholars as the most influential American literary critic of the period, such a study is long overdue.
            Beginning with a detailed examination of the European and domestic sources that led James and Howells toward realism, Davidson examines the interrelationships between the two writers, with special emphasis on their diverging aesthetic concerns and attitudes toward the market and audience, their beliefs concerning the moral value of fiction and the United States as a literary subject, and their various writings about each other. A rigorous, intertextual reading of their work as critics reveals both deeper rifts and more intimate similarities between the two writers than have been recognized previously. Of special note is Davidson’s careful attention to the frequently overlooked final two decades of Howells’s career.
            This close look at the lesser-known critical work of James and Howells will appeal both to scholars of the period and to anyone seeking an exceptional introduction to a crucially important era of American literary criticism.
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