American Realism1850-1900The Civil War and Post-War Period

Thomas Charles Farrer (1839-1891), Mount Tom, 1865

Realists sought to accurately portray real life, without filtering it through personal feelings, romanticism, or idealism.

Elements of Literature, 6th ed (419)

Response to• Start of the Civil War• Rapidly growing cities

and slums• Factories replacing

farms• Corruption in politics

(slavery, civil rights for women, immigrants)

Children in Mullen’s Alley, photograph, Jacob Riis, 1888

American Realism

• The world is what it is, and that can be awful and frightening• verisimilitude• accepting reality as reality• rejection of the sensational sentimental with

focus on the ordinary man• loss of optimism; no rose-colored glasses• relied on facts and events• opened eyes to the fact that slavery undermined

American values

New Voices, New Subjects• regionalism: added

extreme detail to the setting; the setting was a character symbolically

• naturalism: even more real; extremely detailed; pointed out darkness in our world

• satire: a literary work holding up human vices and follies to ridicule or scorn

satirists like Mark Twain and poets like Walt Whitman tried to ~keep it

real.~