Anyone seeking, as are the contributors to this volume, to write about American literature between the Civil War and World War I in relation to the literary movements known as realism and naturalism faces a twofold initial difficulty. First, there exists a traditional suspicion, often arising from the very attempt to write literary history, of large-scale classifying rubrics. Is there any advantage, one might ask, in conceptualizing the richly diverse expression of this period in terms of such inherent simplification as realism and naturalism? A second problem derives from the recent theorizing of literary study. The attraction, for many theorists, of a deconstructive stance has bred skepticism toward interpretive enterprises that posit such communities of belief and expression as those subsumed under the headings of realism and naturalism. And, from a somewhat different theoretical viewpoint, recent scholars of a New Historicist bent have tended to discount traditional historical divisions in the study of American literature on the ground that they obscure underlying ideological similarities present in all American writing since the Civil War.