Download or read book American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract written by Brook Thomas and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Moving expertly from legal analysis to social history to profoundly recontextualized literary critique, Thomas shows how writers like Twain, James, Howells, and Chopin took up contract as a model, formally and thematically evoking its possibilities and dramatizing its failures.