Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/113

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Contemporary Tendencies
95

antithetical episode of historical romance. At the same time there are still novels of many types: domestic and sentimental romances; tales of wild adventure; stories written to exploit a single character in the tradition of F. Hopkinson Smith’s[1] Colonel Carter of Cartersville (1891), Edward Noyes Westcott’s David Harum (1898), and Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1905); a few records of exotic life at the ends of the earth; narratives, nicely skirting salaciousness, of “fast” New York; affectionate, idealized portrayals, as in the work of James Lane Allen for Kentucky, of particular states or neighbourhoods. But no tendency quite so clearly prevails as romance in the thirties, sentimentalism in the fifties, realism in the eighties, or naturalism at the turn of the century.

  1. See Book III, Chap. VI