Student Profiles: Thomas Fellers
Right
now I am exploring William Dean Howells and the novel of business during America’s gilded age. Repeatedly throughout his novels, Howells
dramatizes the tensions between a person’s ethics and the pressures to
survive economically in an industrialized post-Civil War era. Many times
these struggles result from an idealized way of proceeding, an unrealistic
vision of how life should be lived — socially and economically. One
might call such perspectives ‘romantic,’ a term that also characterizes
many of the popular novels of the later nineteenth century. Howells
had ethical problems with the novel created for aesthetic purposes only. While
such books attracted large numbers of readers, they did not accomplish what
Howells saw as the moral imperative of literature: to portray life as
realistically as possible. My goal in this study is to show how Howells
creates an intricate bond between ethical business practice and literary realism,
and, in so doing, struggles himself to ‘sell’ without ‘selling
out.’ I also enjoy studying the form and theory of satire, literary
journalism (or creative nonfiction), and the iconology of war.