ABSTRACT
The general characteristics of Harold Frederic's realism are clearly evidenced by the extract from The Damnation of Theron Ware. Theron Ware has just arrived as the newly-appointed Methodist minister for Octavius, a small upstate New York town, clearly modelled on the Utica, New York, in which Frederic grew up. Frederic's earlier novels, such as Seth's Brother's Wife, a broadly Howellsian novel of society and politics in upstate New York, and In the Valley, an historical romance set in the period of the American Revolution, reveal similar formal and thematic inadequacies and uncertainties. Frederic is clearly aware of the powerful, progressive forces that are inevitably transforming America and its culture, and in his literary allegiances at least, he himself is very much part of that process of cultural change. When the forces of change strike at traditional value systems, however, his attitude becomes much more ambivalent.
