American Realism
American Realism in literature refers to a movement that emerged in the late 19th century, focusing on depicting everyday life and its struggles with a sense of objectivity and truth. Writers such as Mark Twain and Henry James sought to portray the complexities of human experience and society, often addressing social issues and the impact of industrialization on American life.
7 Key excerpts on "American Realism"
eBook - ePub- Jacob Stratman(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Research & Education Association(Publisher)
...Chapter 4 Realism and Naturalism (1865–1910) REALISM I am making a slight change to the dates that the College Board (creators of the CLEP tests) states in its literature. Some scholars believe that realism as a literary movement began closer to 1870, but many more scholars point to the beginning of the Civil War as the beginning of American literary realism. Bullets, bloodshed, and brotherly bickering ushered in a reality that reacted strongly to the idyllic existence American romanticism painted. Then, after the battles ended, America began to grow and to expand its urban areas at the expense of its rural areas. The Industrial Revolution and increased European immigration caused a boom in urban populations. Post–Civil War America found itself in an existence of disillusionment and cynicism. Major technological breakthroughs also occurred at the end of the nineteenth century: the invention of the telephone, the completion of the transcontinental railroad, and, of course, the introduction of the automobile. So literary realism is the label we give to those works that attempt to portray life as it actually is and not simply as the writer wishes (the latter being idealism). The brief historical information just mentioned is important because those incidents influenced writers who focused their plots and characters on the very immediate happenings of people in particular cultural moments. Realism is very interested in the mundane episodes of middle-class life; therefore, realist novels tended to lean towards social reform. Also, writers took it upon themselves to critically comment on America’s politics, economics, industry, and social issues, as well as gender, class, and race issues. Naturalism Literary naturalism is said to be a product of scientific determinism. Here’s a simple definition: You are controlled by your environment. There is no hope for you. Dreams come and dreams go. You are controlled by your gender, race, socioeconomic standing, and ethnicity...
eBook - ePub- Steven Earnshaw(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Manchester University Press(Publisher)
...1 The nineteenth-century Realist novel: two principles Characteristics of the Realist novel The Realist novel presents stories, characters and settings that are similar to those commonly found in the contemporary everyday world. This requires events to take place in the present or recent past, and the events themselves are usually organised in a linear, chronological sequence, and located in places familiar to author and audience either through direct observation or report. The characters and storylines are plausible, and in this they are therefore commonplace rather than out of the ordinary. The desire to portray contemporary everyday life entails and requires a breadth of social detail, and, as a consequence, the classes represented tend to be those categorised as working class and middle class, since these form the majority of the population. The medium of representation is prose fiction, and the prose itself is functional rather than poetic, accessible rather than elevated or ornate – it is the language of newspapers and Parliamentary reports, for instance, and aims to accurately represent the real life it draws upon. Similarly, rendering of dialogue should be authentic and plausible. The subject matter for the Realist novel is whatever is to be found in everyday life, good and bad. The narrative point of view is characteristically omniscient. The novels often engage with social issues of the day, for instance, employment relations, or the place of women in society. Related to this, the Realist novel may thus offer some moral viewpoint, but there is a Realist sensibility that pressures this to be subordinate to neutrality and objectivity as the novel strives for accuracy in its representation. As part of the drive to be accurate, the representations are often given in detail...
...The development of naturalism out of realism revealed a significant point about narration, especially when naturalism was transposed to the relatively young literary context of the United States. America in the late nineteenth century, particularly through the novels and criticism of William Dean Howells, had witnessed realist currents in narrative which, paralleling developments in Europe (Borus 1989; Lehan 1995), then gave way to a form in narrative which was given the specific name of ‘American naturalism’ (Âhnebrink 1950; Walcutt 1956; Seltzer 1986; Ammons 1995; Budd 1995). At a time of rapid industrialization and automation, increasing capitalist exploitation and mass immigration, ‘American naturalism’, in consonance with its European counterpart, sought to do two things. First, it wished to depict the grand passions of common people who often led short and brutish lives determined by factors of heredity and environment of which they were often unaware. This ‘revolt against gentility’ (Cowley 1959) through the depiction of harsh realities was memorably expressed by the naturalist writer, Frank Norris, when he declared older styles of realism to be defunct: “Realism is minute; it is the drama of a broken teacup, the tragedy of a walk down the block, the excitement of an afternoon call, the adventure of an invitation to visit” (1903: 216). Second, naturalism sought to render real passions in a detached way, through a prose style that was ‘transparent’ in that it sought to efface its own artifice, offered no comment and was, indeed, an ‘anti-style’ or ‘non-style’. It is fairly clear that the naturalists’ second aim met with abject failure, especially in the case of Norris, whose call for a transparent style was undermined by sometimes absurdly melodramatic prose in his own fiction (Bell 1993: 115ff.). But this did not stop narratives striving for the long-anticipated goal of presenting the common American voice in literature (Berthoff 1981)...
...III LITERARY REALISM AS FORMAL ART 5 REALITY EFFECTS We saw in Part I that during the twentieth century the tradition of realist writing came under criticism from first a modernist and then a postmodernist perspective. At the centre of these critiques is an accusation that literary realism practises a form of dishonesty, veiling its status as art to suggest it is simply a copy or reflection of life. In so doing, its critics claim, it shores up the complacency of assumed notions and prejudices about the world rather than producing challenging new forms of knowledge. In Part II, I aimed to show that the development of the realist novel during the nineteenth-century was characterised by continuous experimentation with narrative techniques, by democratisation of subject matter and often by confrontation with authority. Yet the very success of realism as a form means that we do now rather tend to take it for granted. One of the main aims of Part III, therefore, is to look more closely at the intrinsic, formal aspects of realist writing in order to appreciate more fully the artistic achievement of creating the effect of ‘being just like life’. Formalism is an approach to art that focuses primarily upon immanent or inherent, self-contained aspects of the artistic form and structure of a work rather than its extrinsic relationship to actuality. In the early part of the twentieth century, formalism was developed as the preferred approach to literature in both America and Russia. Although American New Critics and Russian Formalists pursued quite different agendas and were unaware of each other’s existence, they shared a common belief that the study of literature needed to aspire to the objective status of science...
eBook - ePubRealism and Power (Routledge Revivals)
Postmodern British Fiction
- Alison Lee(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Nevertheless, some manifestations of the Realist movement still have currency, particularly, as Flaubert’s Parrot suggests, the notion that art is a means to truth because the artist has a privileged insight into a common sense of what constitutes “reality.” In a sense, even Geoffrey Braithwaite’s touristy enthusiasm is the result of this suspect belief. His example, however, is followed by all those similar enthusiasts who look for Michael Henchard’s house in Dorchester or Romeo and Juliet paraphernalia in Verona. Recently, the English National Trust decided to refashion the Suffolk landscape to make it resemble Constable’s painting The Hay wain, and a series of huge timbers found in the River Stour have become news items because they may be from the boat that inspired Constable’s Boat Building Near Flatford Mill. All of these are examples of a fascination with Realism. As a literary movement, 1 Realism was first formulated in mid-nineteenth-century France, although it soon gained currency in England and the rest of Europe. The term first appears in France in 1826 when a writer in Mercure Français comments that “this literary doctrine, which gains ground every day and will lead to faithful imitation not of the masterworks of art but of the originals offered by nature, could very well be called realism. According to some indications it will be the literature of the 19th century, the literature of the true” (Wellek 1966 : vol. 4:1). There is no formal manifesto of Realism in the way that the prefaces to the 1802 and 1805 editions of the Lyrical Ballads set the scope and limits of English Romanticism. However, a conjunction of publications and events in France in the mid-1850s made Realism a topic for often heated debate: It was in 1855 that the painter Courbet placed the sign “Du Réalisme” over the door of his one man show...
eBook - ePubReading Between the Lines
A Christian Guide to Literature
- Gene Edward Veith Jr.(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Crossway(Publisher)
...In doing so, he pushed realism itself closer to fantasy. The best modern realistic novelists draw on both the outer and the inner realities. William Faulkner captured the people and places of the backwoods South in vivid detail, but he also plunged into the minds of the characters, reflecting the complexity of their thoughts and emo tions in the very style of his prose. Faulkner’s realism anatomized the social structure of the South while at the same time affirming the com plexity and the dignity of his characters. Faulkner is profoundly demo cratic in the respect he shows for ordinary people. His “white trash” share-croppers, black farm hands, and seedy aristocrats lack refinement, but he never belittles them. Instead, he reveals that ordi nary life contains material enough for the highest art. The same can be said for Hemingway and Steinbeck, the other great modern American realists. Hemingway’s style, nearly opposite to Faulkner’s, is spare, terse, and cut to the bone. Disdaining flowery descriptions and commentary by the narrator, Hemingway’s mastery of dialogue and point of view create the effect of immersing the reader in the world of the characters. Steinbeck was more interested in the social problems of the country, but he never neglected the individual, whom he set against the backdrop of a natural world evocatively described. Steinbeck often turned to the Bible to amplify his themes (consider his titles East of Eden and Grapes of Wrath), and, like Faulkner, operated with a strong moral sensibility. From a Christian point of view, realism can be a way of coming to grips with the world and the human condition. Christianity is not primarily subjective, but objective. That is, it is not simply a matter of mystical feelings experienced in the private sanctum of the self...
eBook - ePub- Frederic Neyrat(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...6 Materialism and realism On literary realism, naturalism, and objectivist poetry Literature and the existential profusion of the real We would like to hunt, catch, and brandish reality like a trophy, in saying: “Look, this is reality, take a picture.” But reality’s materiality is startling, as soon as we think we have caught it, the prey vanishes like an illusion, escapes like a ghost, or changes its form and reveals itself as completely different from what the hunter thought it was. Reality is so unreal sometimes, that we need a materialism able to be commensurate to the incommensurability, to the excessiveness of reality. To identify what I shall call in this chapter a materialism of the excess, I will show that literature offers an account of reality that does not exactly fit what speculative realism and object-oriented ontology argue: Reality, literature demonstrates, cannot be reduced to an object, reality divides objects, overwhelms them, revealing in the objects an obscure insideness striving to escape any objective limitations. To show this, I decided to study what might be seen, wrongly, as the three literary genres the closest to speculative realism and object-oriented ontology: Literary realism, naturalism, and objectivist poetry. The paradox is that the more realist literature and naturalist novels try to depict reality, the more reality reveals an excess that cannot be ontologically grasped; the more poetry strives to identify an object, the more the object rebels and claims its multiple, enigmatic relationship with the world...
