AMERICAN LITERATURE 18651914

1
AMERICAN LITERATURE 1865-1914

• Backgrounds and Literary Movements

2
THE TRANSFORMATION OF A NATION

• America was transformed from a rural, agrarian,
  primarily Protestant country before the Civil War
  into an industrialized world power by the start
  of World War I.
• During that same time period, a population
  explosion occurred, with 25 million immigrants
  entering the country and many of them, along with
  Americans from the eastern states, pushing into
  western America, displacing native American and
  Spanish communities, and taxing natural
  resources.

3
Industrialization of America

• Despite the massive suffering of the Civil War,
  the war effort brought about technological
  innovations the first transcontinental railroad
  was completed in 1869 coal, gold, and silver
  mines opened steel cities flourished the
  telephone revolutionzed communication and
  agricultural productivity increased.
• The industrialization of America also brought
  about the rise of economic magnates, such as
  Leland Stanford and J. P. Morgan.

4
Problems

• Problems abounded for small farmers during this
  time, with the advent of large-scale farming and
  landlords who wanted to seize property.
• In many U.S. cities, there was a surplus of
  laborerers, which resulted in low wages. In
  addition, working conditions were often
  dangerous.
• In response to these issues, the first unions,
  including the American Federation of Labor, arose
  in the 1880s.

5
The Age of Isms

• The era between the Civil War and the outbreak of
  World War I has many different labels -- the
  Gilded Age, the Age of Energy, the Belle Epoque -
  no one of which can even begin to encapsulate the
  period as a whole.
• Other names tag the various artistic movements,
  insurrections, and fashions of the time,
  particularly those associated with the end of the
  century, or the fin de siecle such as
  Aestheticism, Symbolism, Decadence, Realism,
  Naturalism, Late Romanticism, and Veritism.

6

• To gain an overview of this dynamic time, it's
  useful to think of it as an era of unprecedented
  belief in systems.
• The enthusiasm for planning, and for developing
  systems to solve problems and create wealth,
  spread into many fields of human endeavor.
• Cities such as Boston, Pittsburgh, New York,
  Chicago, Cleveland, Baltimore, St. Louis, and San
  Francisco exploded in size because of industrial
  innovations
• mobile steam-powered equipment leveled hills and
  filled in marshes, making it possible to build
  almost anywhere.

7

• City-sized new neighborhoods, uniform and orderly
  in layout (though not always sanitary and well
  made), could be constructed in months.
• The same technology brought millions of people
  from the countryside both to live in the newly
  built towns and to work in manufacturing,
  milling, and mass production.

8
American Realism

• American realism (as promulgated by William Dean
  Howells and other social-minded critics) had
  clear premises and procedures Naturalism in the
  hands of Hart Crane, Frank Norris, Harold
  Frederic, and Jack London, was in some ways even
  more doctrinaire.
• In Norris's McTeague, Crane's "The Open Boat" and
  "The Blue Hotel," Frederic's The Damnation of
  Theron Ware, and London's "To Build a Fire," we
  have compelling, vivid fiction constructed around
  characters who characters who are inherently
  incapable of understanding themselves or the
  truth of their surroundings until it is too late,
  and often not even then.

9

• The archetypal American naturalistic man or woman
  is, by the prescription of the mode, a small
  organism propelled along by huge biological and
  environmental forces, with no real chance for
  dominion over his or her own life or destiny.
• Marxism, Utopian and Fabian Socialism, Social
  Darwinism -- these familiar terms come to us from
  out of those times as well, and suggest how
  thoroughly political and philosophical thought
  was overtaken by the same urge to organize,
  systematize, regularize, and make all permanent
  and clear.

10
Paintings

• To get a better feel for the style and values of
  American Realism and Naturalism, look at
  paintings by American artists active during this
  period such as James McNeill Whistler, Mary
  Cassatt, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, and John
  Singer Sargent. Consider the kinds of people and
  settings these naturalist artists paint and the
  way each handles light.
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THE LITERARY MARKETPLACE

• As America expanded geographically and
  ethnically, American literature became more
  varied, both in the types of people who were
  writing, including women and African Americans,
  and in the subjects about which they wrote.

12
Newspapers and Monthly

• After the Civil War Joseph Pulitzer and Randolph
  Hearst each began influential newspapers.
• Many famous authors, including Stephen Crane,
  Theodore Dreiser, and William Dean Howells,
  started their careers as journalists.
• Newspaper syndicates printed short stories and
  serialized novels, bringing longer works to a
  wide audience.

13
Issues

• From 1865 to 1914 a growing body of writing
  described, dissected, and critiqued various
  social, economic, and political institutions.
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story The Yellow
  Wall-paper dramatically addressed women's social
  and psychological needs Henry Adams's Education
  acknowledged and analyzed the disorientation that
  accompanies rapid and continuous change.

14
Varieties

• Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois both
  wrote eloquently -- from antithetical
  perspectives -- on racial inequality, or the
  "Negro problem," setting off a still-continuing
  debate over which strategies will most
  effectively bring African Americans equality.
• Literature in translation was becoming more
  available too at the turn of the century, and
  Americans were reading the works of Tolstoy and
  Chekhov, among others.

15
Prose Fiction

• Clemens, Howells, and James dominated prose
  fiction during the last quarter of the nineteenth
  century.
• Clemens was the most popular of the three. Much
  of his writing was humorous and used the dialect
  of the region he was portraying. His novel
  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is considered a
  masterpiece of colloquial prose.

16
Howells

• Howells, an editor and author, was considered the
  most influential literary figure of the late
  nineteenth century. He published over one hundred
  works, including novels, plays, travelogues,
  essays, and criticism.
• In addition, he was able to write about risky
  subjects -- divorce, spousal abuse, and
  miscegenation -- without offending or alienating
  his audience.

17
James

• James evolved from writing realistic novels to
  offering those that explored the psychological
  and moral nature of humans and the workings of
  their minds.
• He also examined the instability of meaning,
  especially as it derives from individual,
  subjective perception.

18
Realism

• As defined by Howells, literary realism is
  "nothing more and nothing less than the truthful
  treatment of material."
• Howells called for a literary realism that would
  honestly portray commonplace Americans.
• Howells himself, in The Rise of Silas Lapham,
  depicted the businessman Lapham as a familiar
  type the self-made American.

19
VARIETIES OF REALISM

• The realism of the time was also noted for its
  attention to physical details, its lack of
  obvious authorial intrusion, and the careful
  crafting of its dialogue.
• Edith Wharton offered careful settings and
  familiar, representative characters but, more
  than Howells and other realists, inserted her own
  judgment upon her characters and their
  situations.

20
Naturalism

• Naturalism in the literature of the time was an
  extension or intensification of realism it deals
  with characters from the margins of society whose
  fates are sealed by heredity, environment, and
  bad luck. Ambrose Bierce, Stephen Crane, Theodore
  Dreiser, Jack London, and Frank Norris were
  leading naturalists.
• Charles Darwin's theories of evolution provided
  the background for naturalism, particularly his
  idea of the survival of the fittest, the belief
  that organisms adapt and evolve in response to
  environmental conditions.

21
Crane

• Writers responded to Darwin in various ways many
  were interested in understanding the connections
  between biology and society and class many
  explored how disadvantaged people triumphed in
  the face of adversity.
• Crane believed that environment was important but
  that nature, a significant component of any
  environment, is indifferent.
• Such indifference can be overcome, Crane suggests
  in The Open Boat, by the forging of connections
  between humans.

22
Dreiser and Norris

• Dreiser in particular focused on people's
  responses to the challenges of city life.
• Norris, as shown in McTeague, explored the
  tension between fate and free will and between
  materialism and the inner life.

23
REGIONALISM

• Regional writing tried to preserve a record of
  distinctive ways of life before they succumbed to
  industrialization. It also attempted to come to
  terms with the often harsh realities that were
  replacing the older ways.
• Also called "local-color" writing, regionalism
  captures the social, linguistic, and natural
  features of a region yet explores characters from
  a universal perspective.

24
NATIVE AMERICAN HISTORY AND LITERATURE

• From the Jackson presidency (1829-1837) on,
  Indian sovereignty was challenged
• in 1830 the Indian Removal Act allowed the
  relocation of eastern Indians to lands west of
  the Mississippi
• in 1871 Congress stopped making treaties with
  Native Americans and the U.S. Army defeated
  Geronimo
• in 1890 the census bureau closed the western
  frontier, and U.S. troops massacred Lakota people
  at Wounded Knee, South Dakota.

25

• In the years leading up to Wounded Knee, white
  settlers had defied treaties by moving in on
  Indian lands
• when the government did not enforce the treaties,
  frustrated Indians retaliated against the
  settlers -- and often against each other -- and
  ultimately were forced to live on reservations.

26

• In 1889 Jack Wilson, or Wovoka, a Paiute from
  present-day Nevada, had a vision in which God
  instructed him to follow various Indian
  traditions and Christian teachings and to perform
  a series of dances over several nights.
• These practices, out of which arose the Ghost
  Dance religion, were supposed to bring back the
  buffalo and to eliminate the white invaders.
• Threatened by the spread of this religion and by
  Indians who performed the banned rituals, the
  U.S. cavalry massacred hundreds of Native
  Americans at Wounded Knee in December 1890.

27

• During the late nineteenth century,
  anthropologists and others began making
  recordings and transcriptions of the speeches
  that accompanied Native American treaty making.
• Publications of Indian songs by
  ethnomusicologists such as Alice Fletcher and
  Frances Densmore influenced authors like Mary
  Austin, who saw a connection between the work of
  Native poets and that of the Imagist writers.

28

• Natives who left the reservations began to use
  written forms, learning English at federal Bureau
  of Indian Affairs boarding schools run by
  Catholic and Protestant missionaries.
• The often cruel overseers of these schools cut
  off the children's hair, burned their Indian
  clothes, and forbid the use of Native languages.
• Many students tried to run away some committed
  suicide.

29

• Some Native children after boarding school went
  on to pursue further education and later to use
  various western genres -- autobiography, short
  story, essay -- to convey Native experiences.
• Zitkala Sa, John Milton Oskison, and Charles
  Alexander Eastman are among these.