(1860-1914)
Realism - a literary doctrine that called for reality and truth in the depiction of ordinary life.
The main characteristic features:
ü came from Europe;
ü was shaped by the Civil War and the teachings of Ch. Darwin.
ü The dialects, customs, sights and sounds of regional America were observable;
ü a new generation of writers appeared- naturalists.
A host of new writers appeared:
ü Bret Harte, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Kate Chopin, Henry James, Steven Crane, Jack London, Mark Twain, Theodor Dreiser:
a) their background and training were middle- class and journalistic;
b) were influenced by Zola, Flaubert, Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy;
c) tried to portray the American life as it really was.
Bret Harte
ü the first writer of local color to achieve wide popularity;
ü presented stories about western mining towns involving colorful gamblers, outlaws and scandalous women.
H. Beecher Stowe. Kate Chopin, Mark Twain
ü provided regional stories and tales of the lives of America’ s Westerners, Southerners, Easterners.
Darwinism:
ü stressed the animality of man;
ü suggested the people were dominated by irresistible forces of evolution.
Naturalism- a new and harsher realism.
ü reached its peak of popularity in the 1880’s;
ü by the turn of the century had begun to decline as its limited resources were exhausted;
ü its most popular writers turned to other literary modes.
Naturalists:
ü tried to achieve extreme objectivity in presenting characters of low social and economic classes;
ü emphasized that:
a) world was amoral;
b) men and women had no free will and their lives were controlled by heredity and the environment;
c) religion was illusory;
d) the destiny of humanity was misery in life and oblivion in death.
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Realism helped prepare the way for social and artistic revolutions of the 20th century.
Stephen Crane. Jack London, Theodore Dreiser
ü wrote detailed descriptions of the lives of people of low social classes;
ü offered frank treatment of human passion and sexuality;
ü portrayed men and women overwhelmed by the blind forces of nature.