See also related bibliographies on individual authors, naturalism, and local color fiction.
Barrish, Phillip. American Literary Realism: Critical Theory and Intellectual Prestige, 1880-1995. Cambridge: Oxford U P, 2001.
Brodhead, Richard. Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Bell, Michael Davitt. The Problem of American Realism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.
Becker, George, ed. and introd. Documents of Modern Literary Realism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963.
Berthoff, Werner. The Ferment of Realism: American Literature, 1884-1919. New York: Free Press, 1965.
Borus, Daniel. Writing Realism: Howells, James, and Norris in the Mass Market. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1989.
Bowron, Bernard R., jr. "Realism in America." Comparative Literature 3.3 (Summer 1951): 268-285.
Cady, Edwin H. The Light of Common Day: Realism in American Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1971.
Carter, Everett. Howells and the Age of Realism. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1954.
Chase, Richard. The American Novel and Its Tradition. Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1957.
Corkin, Stanley. Realism and the Birth of the Modern United States : Cinema, Literature, and Culture. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996.
Dike, Donald. "Notes on Local Color and Its Relation to Realism." College English 14 (1952): 81-88.
Elliott, Michael A. The Culture Concept: Writing and Difference in the Age of Realism. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 2002.
Fetterley, Judith, and Marjorie Pryse. Writing out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture. Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P., 2003.
Fisher, Philip K. Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel. New York: Oxford U P, 1985.
Geismar, Maxwell. Rebels and Ancestors: The American Novel, 1890-1915. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953.
Glazener, Nancy. Reading for Realism: The History of a Literary Institution. Durham: Duke University Press,1997.
Habegger, Alfred. Gender, Fantasy, and Realism in American Literature. New York: Columbia U P, 1982.
Harris, Sharon M. "'a New Era in Female History': Ninteenth-Century U. S. Women Writers." American Literature 74.3 (2002): 603-18.
Harris, Sharon M. Rebecca Harding Davis and American Realism. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P., 1991.
Hirsch, John C. "Realism Renewed." Journal of American Studies 25 (1991): 235-43.
Holman, C. Hugh. Windows on the World: Essays on American Social Fiction. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1979.
Jehlen, Myra. "The Novel and the Middle Class in America." Ideology and Classic American Literature. Ed. Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen. New York: Cambridge U P, 1986.
Kaplan, Amy. The Social Construction of American Realism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988.
Kolb, Harold H., Jr. The Illusion of Life: American Realism as a Literary Form. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1969.
Levine, George. "Realism Reconsidered." The Theory of the Novel: New Essays. Ed. John Halperin. New York: Oxford U P, 1974. 233-56.
Ludwig, Sämi. Pragmatist Realism : The Cognitive Paradigm in American Realist Texts. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002.
Lutwack, Leonard. "The Iron Madonna and American Criticism in the Genteel Era." Modern Language Quarterly 15 (1954): 343-48.
Martin, Jay. Harvests of Change: American Literature, 1865-1914. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967.
McKay, Janet H. Narration and Discourse in American Realistic Fiction. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1982.
Miller, Elise. "The Feminization of American Realist Theory." American Literary Realism 23.1 (1990): 20-41.
Morgan, William. Questionable Charity: Gender, Humanitarianism, and Complicity in American Literary Realism. Hanover: University Press of New England, 2004. 
Nettels, Elsa. Language and Gender in American Fiction: Howells, James, Wharton, and Cather. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1997.
Peyser, Thomas. Utopia & Cosmopolis : Globalization in the Era of American Literary Realism. Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 1998. Includes chapters on Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edward Bellamy, Howells, and James.
Pizer, Donald, ed. The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism: Howells to London. New York: Cambridge U P, 1995.
Pizer, Donald, ed. Documents of American Realism and Naturalism. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois U P, 1998.
Pizer, Donald. Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth Century American Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois U P, 1966.
Pizer, Donald, and Harbert, Earl, eds. American Realists and Naturalists. Vol. 12 of Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale Research, 1982.
Rohrbach, Augusta. Truth Stranger than Fiction: Race, Realism, and the U.S. Literary Marketplace. Palgrave, 2002.
Salomon, Roger B. "Realism as Disinheritance: Twain, Howells and James." American Quarterly 16 (Winter 1964): 531-44.
Shi, David E. Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture, 1850-1920. New York: Oxford U P, 1995.
Seltzer, Mark. Bodies and Machines. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Stephens, Gary. "Haunted Americana: The Endurance of American Realism." Partisan Review 44 (1977): 71-84.
Sundquist, Eric, ed. and introd. American Realism: New Essays. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1982.
Sundquist, Eric. "Realism and Regionalism." Elliott, Columbia Literary History of the United States. 501-524.
Trachtenberg, Alan. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982.
Thomas, Brook. American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997.
Warren, Joyce W. "Performativity and the Repositioning of American Literary Realism." Challenging Boundaries: Gender and Periodization. Eds. Joyce W. Warren and Margaret Dickie. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2000. 3-25.
Warren, Kenneth. Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.
Ziff, Larzer. The American 1890s: Life and Times of a Lost Generation. New York: Viking, 1966.