The_American_Realism_I.pptVIP

American Literature The American Realism I 1865 - 1918 The reasons for the coming of American realism: The Civil War which broke out in 1861 taught men that life was not so good, man was not and God was not. The war marked a change, in the quality of American life, a deterioration, in fact, of American moral values. It led people to question the assumptions: natural goodness, the optimistic view of nature and man, benevolent God. In post-bellum America increasing industrialization and mechanization of the country in full swing produced soon extremes of wealth and poverty. Wealth and power were more and more concentrated in the hands of the few “captains of industry” or “robber barons”, but life for the millions was fast becoming a veritable struggle for survival. The frontier was about to close and the safety valve was ceasing to operate, a reexamination of life began. Beneath the glittering surface of prospective there lay suffering and unhappiness, Disillusionment and frustration were widely felt. The age of Romanticism and Transcendentalism was by and large over. Meanwhile younger writers appeared on the scene, such as William Dean Howells, Henry James, Mark Twain, and so on, which means the coming of new literary age, American realism. What is American realism? As a literary movement realism came in the latter half of the nineteenth century as a reaction against “the lie” of romanticism and sentimentalism. It expressed the concern for the world of experience, of the commonplace, and for the familiar and the low. The American realists advocated “verisimilitude of detail derived from observation,” the effort to approach the norm of experience —— a reliance on the representative in plot, setting, and character, and to offer an objective rather than an idealized view of human nature and experience. The schools of American Realism: Frontier Humor Midwestern realism Cosmopolitan Novelist Regionalism local color Naturalism The Chicago School of poets The ri