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A Familiar Strangeness: American Fiction And The Language Of Photography, 1939–1945 By Stuart Burrows (Review), Peter Lurie

English Faculty Publications

Stuart Burrows's book makes a strangely familiar claim. Its premise traces an arc in literary history and understandings of vision and epistemology that we think we know but which, in Burrows' hands, in fact turns toward a different idea about American prose realism than one with which we're familiar (that is, that writers responded to the daguerreotype by emulating its representational fidelity). Realist writers like Hawthorne, Stephen Crane, and the early James, Burrows shows, were hardly naïve about the changes in perception wrought by a then-new technology of vision like photography. For their realism is not a version of fiction …