LITERARY REALISM

AND NATURALISM
The Colonial Period (1607–1775)
The Revolutionary Age (1765-
1790)
The Early National Period
(1775–1828)
The American Renaissance
PERIODIZATI (1828–1865)
The Realistic Period (1865–
ON 1900)
The Naturalist Period (1900–
1914)
The Modernist Period (1914–
1939)
The Beat Generation (1944–
1962)
The Contemporary Period
(1939–Present)
■ The Colonial Period (1607–1775)
■ This period goes from the founding of Jamestown up to a decade before the Revolutionary
War. Most writings were historical, practical, or religious in nature.
■ First Slave Narrative , “A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance
of Briton Hammon, a Negro Man,” was published during this period, in 1760 Boston.
■ The Revolutionary Age (1765–1790)
■ This periof begins a decade before the Revolutionary War and ends about 25 years later.
■ Richest period of political workings: “Declaration of Independence,” "The Federalist Papers"
■ The Early National Period (1775–1828)

■ This era in American literature is responsible for notable first works: first American comedy The Contrast by Royall Tyler (1787)and first American Novel The
Power of Sympathy by William Hill, written in 1789.

■ Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper and Charles Brockden Brown are credited with creating distinctly American fiction, while Edgar Allan Poe and
William Cullen Bryant began writing prose and poetry that was markedly different from that of the British tradition.

■ The American Renaissance (1828–1865)

■ Also known as the Romantic Period in America and the Age of Trascendentalism.

■ This period is commonly accepted to be the greatest of American literature: writers include Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau,
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville. Emerson, Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller

■ Inauguration point of American literary criticism , lead by Poe, James Russell Lowell, and William Gilmore Simms.

■ The years 1853 and 1859: first novels written by African-American authors, both male and female: “Clotel,” by William Wells Brown and “Our Nig,” by Harriet E.
Wilson.
■ As a result of the American Civil War,
Reconstruction and the age of industrialism,
American ideals and self-awareness changed

The Realistic in profound ways, and American literature

responded.

Period
■ Realistic descriptions of American life: William
Dean Howells, Henry James, and Mark Twain.

(1865–1900)
■ Regional writing: works of Sarah Orne Jewett,
Kate Chopin, Bret Harte, Mary Wilkins
Freeman, and George W. Cable.
■ In addition to Walt Whitman, another master
poet, Emily Dickinson , appeared at this time.
The ■ Insistence on recreating life as life really is.

Naturalist
■ American Naturalist writers such as Frank
Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack
London created some of the most powerfully

Period raw novels in American literary history.

■ Edith Wharton wrote some of her most

(1900–1914)
beloved classics, such as The Custom of the
Country (1913), Ethan Frome (1911), and The
House of Mirth (1905) during this period.
The Modernist Period (1914–
1939)

■ After the American Renaissance, the Modern Period is the

second most influential and artistically rich age of American
writing.
■ Poets:E.E. Cummings, Robert Frost , Ezra Pound, William Carlos
Williams, Marianne Moore, Langston Hughes, Carl Sandburg,
T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens.
■ Novelists and prose writers: Willa Cather, John Dos Passos,
Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Ernest
Hemingway, William Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, Sinclair Lewis,
Thomas Wolfe, and Sherwood Anderson.
■ Major movements including the Jazz Age, the Harlem
Renaissance, and the Lost Generation.
The Beat Generation (1944–1962)

Beat writers, such as Rise in confessional

Jack Kerouac and poetry and sexuality
Allen Ginsberg, were in literature, which
devoted to anti- resulted in legal
traditional literature, challenges and
in poetry and prose, debates over
and anti- censorship in
establishment politics. America..
The ■ After World War II, American literature has become broad
and varied in terms of theme, mode, and purpose.
Contemporary ■ Number of important writers since 1939 whose works may
Period (1939– already be considered “classic”:Kurt Vonnegut, Amy Tan,
John Updike, Eudora Welty, James Baldwin, Sylvia Plath,
Present) Arthur Miller, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, Joan Didion,
Thomas Pynchon, Elizabeth Bishop, Tennessee Williams,
Philip Roth, Sandra Cisneros, Richard Wright, Tony Kushner,
Adrienne Rich, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Joyce Carol
Oates, Thornton Wilder, Alice Walker, Edward Albee,
Norman Mailer, John Barth, Maya Angelou, and Robert
Penn Warren.
Victorianism-
Queen Victoria
VICTORIANISM
ANGLO-AMERICAN
INTERDEPENDENCE
American Victorianism & cultural
diversity
AMERICAN VICTORIANISM & CULTURAL
DIVERSITY
EUGENE D. GENOVESE,
ROLL, JORDAN, ROLL:
THE WORLD THE
SLAVES MADE, 1974
LITERARY REALISM
Few decades after the
Civil war
■ new prosperity and transformation into an industrial giant
■ over half the population in the Eastern states living in towns
and cities
■ emergent ideology of success celebrated the growth of
American power and wealth
■ spread of education and literacy
■ the technology of mass production
■ the access to market opened by the railways all meant that
something like a uniform print culture was possible for the
entire nation
LITERARY REALISM

■ Where romanticists transcend the immediate to find the ideal, and naturalists plumb the actual
or superficial to find the scientific laws that control its actions, realists center their attention to a
remarkable degree on the immediate, the here and now, the specific action, and the verifiable
consequence.

■ William Harmon and Hugh Holman, A Handbook to Literature, Pearson/Prentice Hall, 1999, p.
428).
■ “whatever was being produced in fiction during the 1870s and 1880s
that was new, interesting, and roughly similar in a number of ways can
be designated as realism, and that an equally new, interesting, and
roughly similar body of writing produced at the turn of the century can
be designated as naturalism.”

■ Donald Pizer, The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and

Naturalism: Howells to London, Cambridge University, 1995p. 5).
■ William Dean Howells (1837 – 1920), Rebecca
Harding Davis, Henry James (1843 – 1916),
Mark Twain (1835–1910).

American ■ Regional writing/local color: Sarah Orne

Jewett (1849 – 1909), Kate Chopin (1851 –

Realism-
1904), Bret Harte (1836 – 1902), Mary Wilkins
Freeman, and George W. Cable.

Authors
■ Poets: Walt Whitman (1819–1892), Emily
Dickinson (1830–1886), Edward Arlington
Robinson (1869 – 1935); Robert Frost (1874 –
1963); Carl Sandburg (1878 – 1967).
Walt Whitman (1819–
1892)
■ romanticism and transcendentalism
■ Use of free verse and celebration of the
individual
■ Whitman embraced the common man,
everyday life, and the diversity of American
experience
■ His poetry, especially in Leaves of Grass,
celebrated ordinary people and the
physical world,
Emily Dickinson
(1830–1886)
■ highly personal,
introspective poetry,
■ often focused on
abstract themes such
as death,, and the
passage of time and the
inner workings of the
mind.
■ poetic style: short lines,
unconventional
punctuation, and slant
rhyme
■ Symbolism and
modernism
“strategy for imagining and managing the
threats of social change”

Amy Kaplan, Social Construction of American

Realism, The University of Chicago Press,
1988, p. ix
Characteristics

Selective
Realism often
Realism renders presentation of reality The environment
involves an
reality closely and in with an emphasis on plays a crucial role in
exploration of
comprehensive verisimilitude, or the shaping the
thoughts and
details quality of appearing characters
emotions.
true or real.

Relatable and
Dialogue often complex characters ,
Settings are typically mirrors everyday often drawn from
contemporary or from speech, including Sensory Details various social classes
the recent past. regional dialects and (mostly middle and
colloquialisms lower classes) and
backgrounds.

Inner Lives
Themes

It often highlighted
Moral complexity,
American realism the connection
illustrating that real
often addresses between America’s
life is not black and
social issues economic changes
white.
and its moral state.

New range of
characters, including
industrial workers,
Presence of historical
the rural poor,
events and realities
businessmen,
in the narratives.
vagrants, prostitutes,
and unheroic
soldiers.
Cultural Context and Themes

American realism British realism

o Individualism o Social Class and Morality

o Social Issues o Family and Community.

o Frontier Experience
Characterization

American realism British realism

o Diverse Characters o Complex Social Interactions

o Psychological Exploration o Archetypal Characters

Style and Narrative Techniques

American realism British realism

o Regionalism o Descriptive Prose

o Direct Language o Third-Person Omniscience

Historical Influences

American realism British realism

o Post-Civil War Era: o Victorian Era.

o Focus on Expansion and o Colonial Context

Change
Influence of Naturalism

American realism British realism

■ Transition to Naturalism ■ Less Emphasis on Naturalism

Mark Twain
(1835–1910)

■ “the Gilded Age.”

■ “My books are
simply
autobiographies”
■ Accounts of travels:
■ The Innocents
Abroad (1869)
■ Roughing It (1872)
■ A Tramp Abroad
(1880).
“The matter of
Hannibal”
■ City of Hannibal, Marion Co.,
Missouri 1869.
■ The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
(1884)
■ The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn (1885)
THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN
Mark Twain, Huckleberry
Finn

■ “a book of mine where a sound heart

and a deformed conscience come into
collision and conscience suffers a
defeat.”
■ Mark Twain
RIVERBANK AND RIVER
HENRY
JAMES
(1843–
1916)
First Period (moral
realism)
■ Roderick Hudson (1876)
■ The American (1877)
■ The Europeans (1878).

■ The Portrait of a Lady (1881).

First Period- The Portrait
of a Lady (1881)

■ “A certain young woman affronting her

destiny.”
■ Strong elements of romance or fairytale
■ Exploration of the subtle workings of
consciousness.
■ Contrast between Europe and America
■ The human use of other human beings
Second Period (dramatic
realism)

■ careful manipulation of point of view

■ intricate structuring of contrasting episodes
and characters
■ focus on dialogue and dramatic scene to
achieve d “the maximum of intensity with
the minimum of strain.”
Third Period
(psychological realism)

■ The Ambassadors (written in 1901 and

published in 1903)
■ The Wings of the Dove (1902)
■ The Golden Bowl (1904)
Literary
Regionalisms/
Local Color
■ “In local-color literature one
finds the dual influence of
romanticism and realism, since
the author frequently looks away
from ordinary life to distant
lands, strange customs, or exotic
scenes, but retains through
minute detail a sense of fidelity
and accuracy of description”
■ James D. Hart, The Oxford
Companion to American
Literature, Oxfrod University,
1983, p. 439).
Eric Sundquist, To Wake the
Nations: Race in the Making
of American Literature, 1978

■ “Economic or political power can itself

be seen to be definitive of a realist
aesthetic, in that those in power (say,
white urban males) have been more
often judged ‘realists,’ while those
removed from the seats of power (say,
Midwesterners, blacks, immigrants, or
women) have been categorized as
regionalists.”
Contribution to the reunification of the
country after the Civil War and to the
construction of national identity
■ “regionalism's representation of ■ “urban middle-class readership […] was
vernacular cultures as enclaves of solidified as an imagined community by
tradition insulated from larger consuming images of rural 'others' as
cultural contact is palpably a fiction both a nostalgic point of origin and a
[…] its public function was not just to measure of cosmopolitan development”
mourn lost cultures but to purvey a
■ “separate spaces” serving to erase the
certain story of contemporary
“more explosive social conflicts of class,
cultures and of the relations among
race, and gender made contiguous by
them”
urban life”
■ Richard Brodhead, Cultures of
■ Amy Kaplan, “Nation, Region, and
Letters, University of Chicago Press,
Empire” in Emory Elliot (ed.) Columbia
1993, p. 121
History of the American Novel, Columbia
U.p., 1991, pp. 240-266, p. 251
Plantation tradition
■ Idyllic past
■ Enslaved people were content in their
slavery and enjoyed the benefits of white
Christian civilization under the careful
guidance of the master class.
■ “Happy darky”
Plantation Myth

■ “plantation tradition” that romanticized

slavery was invented by Thomas Nelson
Page. Page’s In Ole Virginia (1887) was
“a collection of dialect stories narrated
by a faithful ex-slave who reminisces
nostalgically about ‘dem good ole times’
■ Amy Kaplan, “Nation, Region, and
Empire” in Emory Elliot (ed.) Columbia
History of the American Novel, Columbia
U.p., 1991, pp. 240-266, p. 244.
Literary regionalism
Key Characteristics
■ 1. Emphasis on Specific Regions (ex. Sarah Orne
Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs)
■ 2. Use of Dialect and Vernacular Language (ex.
Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn)
■ 3. Focus on Ordinary People and Rural Life (ex.
Kate Chopin’s Bayou Folk)
■ 4. Strong Sense of Place (ex. Willa Cather’s My
Ántonia )
■ 5. Local Customs and Traditions (ex. Bret Harte's
The Luck of Roaring Camp )
■ 6. Tension Between Regional and National
Identity (ex. Sarah Orne Jewett's A White Heron )
Literary regionalism
Themes
■ 1. Cultural Preservation
■ 2. Nostalgia for a simpler,
pastoral past,
■ 3. The Impact of Geography
■ 4. Social Hierarchies and Class
NATURALISM
■ whatever was being produced in fiction during the
1870s and 1880s that was new, interesting, and
roughly similar in a number of ways can be
designated as realism, and that an equally new,
interesting, and roughly similar body of writing
produced at the turn of the century can be
designated as naturalism.

■ Donald Pizer, The Cambridge Companion to

American Realism and Naturalism: Howells to
London, Cambridge University, 1995p. 5).
Influences on American
naturalism
■ Emile Zola Le roman experimental,1880
■ Claude Bernard's medical model
■ Hippolyte Taine “virtue and vice are products
like vitriol and sugar”
■ Herbert Spencer- Social Darwinism
■ “Survival of the fittest”
■ Revelling in the extraordinary, the excessive,
and the grotesque in order to reveal the
immutable bestiality of Man in Nature,
naturalism dramatizes the loss of individuality
at a physiological level by making a Calvinism
without God its determining order and violent
death its utopia”
■ (Eric Sundquist, “Introduction. The Country of
the Blue” in Eric Sundquist (ed.) American
Realism: New Essays, Johns Hopkins University
Press , 1982 p. 13).
■ [T]he naturalistic novel usually contains two tensions or
contradictions, and […] the two in conjunction comprise
both an interpretation of experience and a particular
aesthetic recreation of experience. In other words, the two
constitute the theme and form of the naturalistic novel. The
first tension is that between the subject matter of the
naturalistic novel and the concept of man which emerges
from this subject matter. The naturalist populates his novel
primarily from the lower middle class or the lower class […]
His fictional world is that of the commonplace and unheroic
in which life would seem to be chiefly the dull round of daily
existence, as we ourselves usually conceive of our lives.But
the naturalist discovers in this world those qualities of man
usually associated with the heroic or adventurous, such as
acts of violence and passion which involve sexual adventure
or bodily strength and which culminate in desperate
moments and violent death. A naturalistic novel is thus an
extension of realism only in the sense that both modes
often deal with the local and contemporary. The naturalist,
however, discovers in this material the extraordinary and
excessive in human nature.
■
■ The second tension involves the theme of the naturalistic
novel. The naturalist often describes his characters as
though they are conditioned and controlled by
environment, heredity, instinct, or chance. But he also
suggests a compensating humanistic value in his characters
or their fates which affirms the significance of the individual
and of his life. The tension here is that between the
naturalist's desire to represent in fiction the new,
discomfiting truths which he has found in the ideas and life
of his late nineteenth-century world, and also his desire to
find some meaning in experience which reasserts the
validity of the human enterprise”.

■ Donald Pizer, Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century

American Fiction, Revised Edition, 1984, pp. 10-11
Naturalism
Characteristics
■ Characters: Frequently lower-class
characters whose lives are governed by
the forces of heredity, instinct, and
passion.
■ Techniques and plots: Charles Child
Walcutt: “clinical, panoramic, slice-of-life”
drama (Charles Child Walcutt, American
Literary Naturalism: A Divided Stream,
1956, p. 21).
■ The novel of degeneration (ex. Frank
Norris, Vandover and the Brute, 1894
Naturalism-Themes
■ Survival, determinism, violence, and taboo as key themes
■ “Brute within”
■ Nature as an indifferent force acting on the lives of human
beings
■ The forces of heredity and environment as they affect
individual lives
■ Free will as an illusion
■ Social and Economic Pressures
“The Open Boat” by
Stephen Crane- 1898

■ This tower was a giant, standing with its

back to the plight of the ants. It
represented in a degree, to the
correspondent, the serenity of nature amid
the struggles of the individual--nature in
the wind, and nature in the vision of men.
She did not seem cruel to him then, nor
beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise. But
she was indifferent, flatly indifferent
Frank Norris

Stephen Crane

Naturalism Theodore Dreiser

Writers Jack London

Others: Willa Cather, Henry

James