Experimental realisms

Gertrude Stein, now widely canonized as an “experimental” writer, called her story “Melanctha” (1909) “the first definite step away from the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century in literature.”1 Her erstwhile mentor, the philosopher and experimental psychologist William James, wrote of it: “this is a fine new kind of realism.”2 Experimental? Realist? Nineteenth-century, or a step into the twentieth?