美国现实主义时期 s.doc

Section 3 American Realistic Period （Late 19th Century-1910） I Historical Background 1.1 The Civil War (1860 – 1865) Significance: reunification of the North and the South; fast development of capitalism A turning point of American culture: most people abandoned Transcendentalism gradually and lost old moral values. 1.2 Industrialization American economy developed very fast in the late part of the 19th century. Extreme of wealth and poverty appeared. Money concentrated into a small group of people while the masses struggled for survival. Most people in the country developed strong ambition for power and money. 1.3 Closing Frontier The frontier was closing. The worth of the American dream, the idealized, romantic view of man and his life in the New World, began to lose its hold on the imagination of the people. “Golden Age” turned out to be a “Gilded Age” (Mark Twain: prosperous surface, developing dark sides in society) II Literature in American Realistic Period Realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material. - William Dean Howells 2.1 American Realism American Realism rose in the latter half of the 19th century (esp. 1870s, 1880s). Realism reacted against romanticism and sentimentalism. It expressed the concern for the commonplace, and for the familiar and the low. In style, it moved between gentility and graceful prose on the one hand and vernacular diction, rough and ready frontier humor on the other. Realistic writers sought to portray American life as it really was, insisting that the ordinary and the local were as suitable for artistic portrayal as the magnificent and the remote. Representative writers: William Dean Howells, Henry James and Mark Twain William Dean Howells (1837-1920): the arbiter of American literary realism, found his subject matter in the experiences of the middle class by sustaining an objective point of view. Though he criticized the materialism, but he was mainly optimistic. He believed in the strengt