2130_American Lit Module _Introduction

American Literature 1865–1914An Introduction

The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company

• Territorial Expansion and Growth– Transcontinental Railroad– The frontier “closes” in the 1890s– Expansion beyond the continent

• Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Hawaii– Impact on Native Americans

• Reservations • The Dawes Allotment Act

The Transformation of a Nation












• Immigration and growth– Rapid population growth

• 1870 population: 38.5 million• 1910 population: 92 million• 1920 population: 123 million

– Most population growth is from European immigration

– Rural population declines as urban population increases















• Industrialization– The amount of capital invested in manufacturing

quadruples between 1850 and 1880– Monopolies allow a small number of men to

control profitable enterprises– Immigrants (and their children) provide the labor

force for the Industrial Era– A vast disparity in wealth emerges between the

very rich and the very poor



















• New character types emerged in post–Civil War literature:– industrial workers – the rural poor – ambitious business leaders – vagrants – prostitutes and “fallen women”– unheroic soldiers

The Literary Marketplace


• Newspapers and magazines nurtured post–Civil War authors– many writers began their careers as journalists– periodicals published fiction by the major authors

of the period– periodicals gave rise to “the literature of

argument”

• The idea of the “Great American Novel” emerged soon after the Civil War

The Literary Marketplace


• Realism is the dominant literary style of the period– William Dean Howells says that literary realism “is

nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.”

– Henry James and Edith Wharton focus their literary realism on interior psychological states.

– Mark Twain works within the tradition of vernacular storytelling.

Forms of Realism and Naturalism


• Naturalism is a type of literary realism characterized by the following:– characters from the fringes of society– human actions shaped by forces beyond our

control (biology, environment, and chance)– a world that is more random than predictable– no “happy endings” for characters

Forms of Realism and Naturalism


We must operate with characters, passions, human and social data as the chemist and the physicist work on inert bodies, as the physiologist works on living bodies. Determinism governs everything. It is scientific investigation; it is experimental reasoning that combats one by one the hypotheses of the idealists and will replace novels of pure imagination by novels of observation and experiment.

—Émile Zola, “The Experimental Novel”

Forms of Naturalism and Realism

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American Literature

1865–1914An Introduction

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2130_American Lit Module _Introduction