"Mary Esteve has produced an original, ambitious, theoretically sophisticated, and deeply learned book that is both tightly focused and wide-ranging. Incremental Realism will be of interest to those seeking to understand the particularities of postwar American literature while also considering what, exactly, constitutes—or ought to constitute—this archive."—Steven Belletto, Lafayette College "Once I started reading this book, I couldn't stop. Incremental Realism is a serious and valuable piece of literary and historical scholarship, but that doesn't give full credit to how the subject matter speaks to the priorities and questions of our own time, or for that matter the subtlety of the argumentation and the passionate commitment to social justice that palpably underlies it."—Bruce Robbins, Columbia University "Esteve not only offers a new way of reading midcentury realist fiction, but she also garners renewed appreciation for the era's welfare-state liberalism... [The postmodernists'] utopian invitation to tear it all down and start over is profoundly alluring—and not particularly productive. The invitation in Incremental Realism is decidedly less sexy, but also redolent with realizable possibility for achieving socioeconomic justice: do the work."—Kathy Knapp, American Literary History
