American Realism,Regionalism, and

Naturalism

1850 – 1920 (ish)

Life in America

✦ Still growing and prosperous at end of 1800s.

✦ Most powerful nation in western hemisphere and about to be the most powerful nation in the world.

✦ Growing working population of industrial workers and farmers.

American Attitudes

✦ Frontier was gone, but still a powerful force.

✦ Dreams of people did not match the realities of their lives.

✦ People uncertain of their place in society. They were fearful they were caught up in large, impersonal forces beyond their control.

Context

✦ America needed a "truer" type of literature that does not idealize people or places and addressed directly the problems we were facing

Definition of Realism✦ A literary and intellectual movement that led poets

and novelists not to imagine life as it could be, but to examine life as it was actually lived and to record what they saw around them as honestly as they could.

✦ The realistic writer is concerned with recording the details of ordinary life, and with showing the reader not generally, but precisely, how ordinary life is lived.

Realism - A Slice of Life

✦ A truthful imitation of ordinary life. A reaction against sentimentality of most romantic fiction.

✦ Versimilitude

Style

Character is more important than action and plot; complex ethical choices are often the subject

Characters appear in their real complexity of temperament and motive

Avoids the sensational and overly dramatic

Language is natural vernacular, not heightened or poetic; tone may be comic, satiric, or matter-of-fact.

Influences on American Realism

✦ Journalistic accounts of the Civil War established a taste for realistic writing.

✦ New subject matter - factory and farm life, slums, corruption, politics, hardships, poverty

✦ Great interest in science and scientific method.

✦ Darwin’s “Law of the Jungle”

Elements of Realism

✦ Realists were concerned with the whole of life, not just surface of it

✦ Produced intensely personal works as well as broad studies of a changing society

✦ Used local color. Portrayed through dialects, dress, mannerisms, custom, character types, and landscape.

Naturalism

Extension or intensification of realism

Characters from the fringes of society who must deal with difficult past, hostile/indifferent society, and/or bad luck

RegionalismAn attempt to faithfully recreate a distinctive way of life in a specific place and time

Use of vernacular, references, and vocabulary

Characters walk, talk, and act in distinctive unique ways