Recent criticism has sought to align Sarah Orne Jewett, a notable writer of regional fiction in the nineteenth-century United States, with the domestic novelists of the previous generation. Her work does resemble the domestic novels of the 1850s in its focus on women, their domestic occupations, and their social interactions, with men belief, to turn from these writers to Jewett is to encounter an almost wholly secular world.
To the extent that these differences do not merely reflect the personal preferences of the authors, we might attribute them to such historical transformations as the migration of the rural young to cities or the increasing secularization of society. But while such factors may help to explain the differences, it can be late nineteenth-century “high-cultural” conception of fiction as an autonomous sphere with value in and of itself.
This high-cultural aesthetic was one among several conceptions of fiction operative in the United States in the 1850s and 1860s, but it became the dominant one later in the nineteenth century and remained so for most of the twentieth. On this conception, fiction came to be seen as pure art: a work should be given more weight in assessing their affinities than any superficial similarity in subject matter.
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