Warner argues that fiction is an art like painting or acting, and that a photograph of life is no more a novel than a plaster cast is sculpture. He objects to the fashionable realist story that introduces interesting people, entangles them and then simply stops, and asks novelists to return to idealisation and resolution.
A short, pointed essay from the realism debates, by Mark Twain’s co-author on The Gilded Age. Download the free EPUB.