ABSTRACT
Attempts to reassert traditional American social ideals, particularly those of freedom, equality, and individualism, or their abandonment under pressure from ideologies spawned by the later developments of industrial capitalism and a consumer-orientated society, must feature among the more significant strands of American intellectual life during the first half of the twentieth century. These struggles, sometimes conducted in the abstract and at others given body by political acts and movements, provide particularly illuminating contexts for the study of the novel，making taxonomic sense of a multitude of seemingly diverse, even meaningless, literary events. The map of the second half of this history is designed to show the various streams of realism continuing to flow throughout the modern period and being replen ished and revitalized by new tributaries, while at the same time a major literary counterforce develops out of all the minor 4anti-modern, reac tions to realism in the 1890s to form a part of the international move ment which is paradoxically called Modernism.
