Title: Realism 1860-1910
1Realism 1860-1910
2Where We Came FromPrevious Literary Movements
- Literature of Puritanism Work Ethic
- Literature of the Revolutionary Period
- American Dream
- The Melting Pot
- Basic rights of man
- Emergence of the Other (women, native people,
African Americans) - Literary Nationalism 1800-1840
- Nationalism (excessive pride)
- Self identity
- Self examination and criticism
- Begins real American literature
- Respected in Europe
- Professional writers
3- ROMANTICISM
- Extraordinary people in extraordinary situations
- Truth in absolutes
- predicated on stereotypes
- Stress on past (Greek Classical period)
- Treats subjects emotionally
- Celebration of artists
- Probe to exaggeration
- Nature glorified
- Belief in afterlife
- Authors
- Literary Nationalism
- Fireside Poets
- Romantics
4- TRANSCENDENTALISM
- Truth communion with God in nature
- Belief in individualism
- Rejects institutions
- Emphasis on simplicity
- Importance of experience
- "majority of one"
- "self-reliance"
- "man thinking
- Non-conformity
- language and style influenced by Romanticism
- Authors
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Henry David Thoreau
5- ANTI-TRANSCENDENTALISM
- Belief in the potential destructiveness of the
human spirit - Belief in individual truths, but no universal
truths, and the truths of existence are deceitful
and disturbing - Evil is an active force in the universe
- Focus on the mans uncertainty and limitations in
the universe - Nature indifferent to mankind
- Human nature hypocritical, apathetic
- Authors
- Herman Melville
- Edgar Alan Poe
- Nathaniel Hawthorne
6What Comes Next?
- If we accept the pendulum theory of history (that
every period moves to its opposite extreme), what
type of voice can you predict reacts to the
Romantic Period?
The Agnew Clinic Thomas Eakins 1889
Washington Crossing the Delaware Emanuel Leutze
1851
7Sectionalism, Industrialism and Literary
Regionalism
- In 1858, Abraham Lincoln had warned his
countryman a house divided against itself cannot
stand. - Events in the dark winter of 1860-1861 would
prove him correct - After Lincolns minority election to the
presidency - South Carolina would vote to secede from the
Union in December 1860 - Six other states of the Deep South quickly
followed suit - When Confederate troops successfully attacked
Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor , Virginia,
Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina elected to
join their fellows in defense of slavery and the
sovereign principles of states rights
8Cost of the Civil War
- Cost of the Civil War
- The Human Cost
- 1,094,543 Casualties
- The North lost one out of ten
- 110,100 in battle
- 224,580 to disease
- The South lost one out of four
- 94,000 in battle
- 64,000 to disease
- Two percent of US population died in the Civil
War, with only WWII claiming more lives - Economic Cost
- Estimated at 6.6 billion, which would be 165
billion today
9Historical Overview
- While an older generation of historians tended to
view the Civil War as the watershed of modern
American nationalism (calling it the second
American Revolution), more recent historians
suggest that the real factors that determined the
future of the nation were the facts that - The country was still badly fragmented after the
war - Congress did little to address this and other
problems
10 Historic Overview
- And even though the language of the Constitution
itself was amended to affirm an expanded that
is, colorblind definition of individual rights
and liberties, meaningful implementation of that
vision for African Americans would have to wait
for almost another century
11Historical Overview
- At the same time, however, the war did unleash a
range of social and economic forces that,
eventually, would radically transform American
life - The Pacific Railroad Act of 1862 set aside vast
tracts of land in the West to finance the
construction of a transcontinental railroad - The Homestead Act of 1862 enabled yeoman farmers
to have cheaper access to government-held land - The Morril Act of 1862 established Federal
support for agricultural colleges
12Historical Overview
- Mobilization for war on such an unprecedented
scale also had unforeseen effect on American
life - The need to achieve organizational efficiency in
both military and civilian branches of government
gave rise to an almost wholly new group of
managers able to transfer their increasingly
professional skills to the business world after
the war.
13Historical Overview
- As an example Keeping thousands of men in
uniform required an entirely new approach to
apparel manufacturing. - At the start of the war, when almost all of the
troops came from volunteer contingents of various
state militias, mothers, wives and daughters
would have sewed individual uniforms at home. - Before long, however, the need for additional
soldiers made the draft inevitable. The
unprecedented demand for huge numbers of
identical trousers, jackets, boots, and other
mainstays of military regimentation sparked the
rapid modernization of the clothing industry by
introducing standard apparel sizes. - The federal government was the first consumer to
make its purchases off the rack. - Take that Old Navy!
14Historical Overview
- These new concepts of scale, efficiency, and
organizational complexity would eventually make
possible what one influential historian referred
to as the incorporation of American or the
way we live now.
- Politically, the goal of securing equal rights
for freed slaves largely failed. - Likewise, failure to integrate the high-minded
ideals of New England into effective public
policy also proved a crucial turning point in
Americas intellectual history
15Historical Context
- Indeed the period following the Civil War was
marked by an affronting sense of the hard
realities of life and the more sobering aspects
of the human experience. - By the End of the Civil War
- The Emancipation Proclamation and 13th Amendment
had abolished slavery - The industrial North had defeated the agrarian
South - Social order grew based on mass labor and mass
consumption - Steam power replaced water power
- Machines replaced hand labor
- Extreme contrast between the rich and poor (the
Gilded Age) - The Industrial Revolution had begun
16Historic Overview
- Migration westward expanded the U.S. from the
Atlantic to the Pacific - Native American populations displaced and
subjugated - Growth of Industry
- Steelmaking, the nations dominant industry
- Alternating electrical current (1886)
- American petroleum industry begins
- Growth of population
- Total population doubled from 1870 to 1890
- National income quadrupled
- Gap between rich and poor widened
17Historic Overview
- The Effects of the Industrial Revolution
- Migration from rural to urban areas
- Independent, skilled workers replaced by
semi-skilled laborers - Large corporations were established, devaluing
the personal relationship between management and
workers or company and customers. - Mass Communication and Migration
- Coast-to-coast communication
- Pony Express (1860)10 days
- Telegraph (1861)just seconds to communicate
across country - Transatlantic telegraph cable (1866) allowed
instant communication with Europe - Telephone patented (1867)
- By 1900, 1.3 million telephones in U.S.
- Coast-to-coast travel
- Transcontinental Railroad (1869)
- By 1889, coast-to-coast travel4 days
- Citizens witnessed the entirety of there country
and grew - curious for more
18Photography and Realism
- The invention ignited an artistic and scientific
frenzy - Best portrait makers could bring out the very
human essence of a subject - The advantages of photography immediacy,
reliable representation, low cost, etc - Massive social changes reflected in literature
photography. - 1861-65 - Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner honest
photographic record of the Civil War. - Photography, like literary Realism and
Regionalism showed TRUTH.
19Historic Overview
- Intellectual Revolution Changes in Thinking
brought about by Changes in Society - Changes in science
- Charles Darwin and the Origin of Species
- Changes in psychology
- Sigmund Freud - unconscious system of ideas that
governs human reactions and response - Changes in philosophy
- Karl Marx - human history as the result of class
struggles (The Communist Manifesto) - William James American pragmatism truth is
- tested by its usefulness or practical
consequences - a commodity accessible on the surface of things
- perceptible to the senses and verifiable through
experience
20Historical Overview
- During this period, Americas literary traditions
also shifted. By the time Lee surrendered at
Appomattox, his armys ranks were severely
depleted, and the same was true of the roll call
of American authorship. Washington Irving, Henry
David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne had died.
Herman Melville was in professional exile and
Ralph Waldo Emerson had published his last book. - The nation now looked to new literary voices
whose accents were not always so comforting. The
cultural supremacy of New England, so long taken
for granted was now open to challenge.
21Historical Overview
- In essence
- The experience of war had expanded American
awareness of its boundaries, physical, emotional,
and spiritual. - The world of the naive, innocent, optimistic, and
contained past appeared hopelessly outdated and
absurdly idealistic. - America enters adulthood Realism is born
22Realism
- Nothing more and nothing less than the truthful
treatment of material. - William Dean Howells
23Historical Overview Realism
- As the novelist Henry James had occasion to
observe in 1879, the Civil War marks an era in
the history of the American mind. It introduced
into the national consciousness a certain sense
of proportion and relation, of the world being a
more complicated place than it had hitherto
seemed, the future more treacherous, success more
difficult. At the rate at which things are
going, it is obvious that good Americans will be
more numerous than ever but the good American,
in the days to come, will be a more critical
person than his complacent and confident
grandfather. He has eaten of the tree of
knowledge.
24A Powerful Reaction Against Romanticism
- The Civil War and the social, political, and
cultural events following the war created an
environment that demanded a literary voice that
honored that experience. Romanticism with his
dreamy, optimistic, and highly emotional emphasis
proved false in light of the turmoil of the
period. - This voice would serve as a reaction against
Romanticism - rejected heroic, adventurous, or unfamiliar
subjects - Note the unmistakable mocking treatment of
Romantic ideals - Emmeline, Tom, and the
traditions of the South in The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn) - Authors sought to portray life as they saw it,
insisting that the ordinary and local were just
as suitable for art as the sublime.
Nothing more and nothing less than the truthful
treatment of material. William Dean Howells
25From these social changes come two literary
movements
- Realism,
- first begun as the local color movement
- Includes regionalism
- The tall tale
- Naturalism
- Realism
- Denotation a literary movement that developed
towards the end of the Civil War and stressed
the actual (reality) as opposed to the imagined
or fanciful
- Begins in France, as realisme, a literary
doctrine calling for reality and truth in the
depiction of ordinary life. - Grounded in the belief that there is an objective
reality which can be portrayed with truth and
accuracy as the goal - The writer does not select facts in accord with
preconceived ideals, but rather sets down
observations impartially and objectively.
26Characteristics of Realism
- Subject matterordinary people and events
- PurposeVerisimilitude, the truthful
representation of life - Point of Viewomniscient and objective
- Charactersmiddle class, psychological realism
- Class is important the novel has traditionally
served the interests and aspirations of an
insurgent middle class. - Diction is natural vernacular, not heightened or
poetic tone may be comic, satiric, or
matter-of-fact. - Focus away from New England and other
intellectual centers and out to the Midwest and
West (regionalism) - Plot de-emphasized
- Focus on everyday life
- Complex ethical choices often the subject
- (I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide,
forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it.) - Events are made to seem the inevitable result of
characters choices - (Aunt Sally shes going to adopt me and sivilize
me, and I cant stand it. I been there before. )
27Characteristics of Realism, cont...
- Subject matter drawn from our experience the
common, the ordinary, the probable - Focuses on the norm of daily experience
dialect, geography, regional manners.
28Romance and Realism Taste and Class
- Romance
- Aspired to the ideal
- Thought to be more genteel since it did not show
the vulgar details of life - Harks back to the noble past
- Emotional
- Realism
- Thought to be more democratic
- Critics stressed the potential for vulgarity and
its emphasis on the commonplace - Potential poison for the pure of mind
- Exists in the unfiltered present
- Neutral (observant)
29Themes in Realism
- Humans control their destinies
- characters act on their environment rather than
simply reacting to it. - Slice-of-life technique
- often ends without traditional formal closure,
leaving much untold to suggest mans limited
ability to make sense of his life. - Pragmatism
- Social Criticism
- Importance of place--regionalism, "local color"
- Sociology and psychology
- Rejection of Romanticism
30Defining Strain
- VOICE the tonal qualities, attitudes, or entire
personality of a speaker as revealed directly or
indirectly through sound, diction, and other
stylistic devices - "Voice reminds us that a human being is behind
the words of a poem, that he is revealing his
individuality by means of the poem, and that this
revelation may be the most significant part of
what we receive from the poem."
31Huckleberry Finn and Realism
- Published in 1885
- Set in pre-Civil War years (40-50 years before
publication) - Slavery ended, but racism still rampant (Jim Crow
Laws) - Mark Twain, a Southerner, undergoes moral
transformation. Suggestion (via Ken Burnss
American Voices) is that this transformation
sprung from a trip along the river years after
Twain left the South. Here, along the shore of
his beloved river, Twain witnessed the great
failings of Reconstruction and the ubiquity of
Jim Crow (a new slavery). - The impression stuck with him.
32The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a
- COMING-OF-AGE NOVEL moral growth of a comic
character in an physically beautiful yet morally
repugnant setting - PICARESQUE NOVEL typically satirical story that
illustrates with realistic and witty detail the
adventures of a roguish hero of lower social
standing who lives by their common sense in a
corrupt society.
33Huckleberry Finn as a Literary Milestone
- Something new happened in Huck Finn that had
never happened in American literature before. It
was a bookthat served as a Declaration of
Independence from the genteel English novel - It allowed a different kind of writing to
happen a clean, crisp, no-nonsense, earthly
vernacularit was a book that talked. Hucks
voice, combined with Twains satiric genius,
changed the shape of fiction in America, and
African-American voices had a great deal to do
with making it what it was. - - Dr. Shelley Fishkin, 1995
34The Linch Pin Between the Movements
- Linch Pin - "something or someone that holds
the various elements of a complicated structure
together." - The transition between two contrasting movements
can be clearly identified in one man, Walt
Whitman, who incorporating both views in his
works
35Walt Whitman Americas Poet
- His poetry celebrated...
- The individual
- common man
- American democracy
- American industry
- American ingenuity
- mystery of existence (not to be feared, but
embraced) - The body and its functions
- He was
- A humanist
- A teacher
- An optimist
- Supporter of the Union
- Among the most influential poets in the American
canon - Highly controversial
- Gay
- And your very flesh shall be a great poem
- I celebrate myself, and sing myself,And what I
assume you shall assume,For every atom belonging
to me as good belongs to you. - Be curious, not judgmental
- Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I
contradict myself, I am large, I contain
multitudes - Afoot and lighthearted I take to the open road,
healthy, free, the world before me.
36Walt Whitman, cont
- The genius of the United States is not best or
most in its executives or legislatures, nor in
its ambassadors or authors or colleges, or
churches, or parlors, nor even in its newspapers
or inventors, but always most in the common
people."
- Leaves of Grass (1855) collection of poems
attempt to reach common person through an
American epic - "Father of Free Verse" -- sought to capture
America's voice through his poetry -
- Whitman created new poetic forms and subjects to
fashion a distinctly American type of poetic
expression. - He rejected conventional themes, traditional
literary references, allusions, and rhymeall the
accepted forms of poetry in the 19th century.
37Whitmans Themes
- Transcendent power of love, brotherhood, and
comradeship - Imaginative projection into others lives
- Optimistic faith in democracy and equality
- Nature and return
- Belief in regenerative and illustrative powers of
nature and its value as a teacher - Equivalence of body and soul and the unabashed
exaltation of the body and sexuality
38Whitmans Poetic Techniques
- Whitman declared his poetry would have
- Long lines that capture the rhythms of natural
speech. - Free verse lack of metrical regularity and
conventional rhyme - Vocabulary drawn from everyday speech.
- A base in reality, not morality.
- Exception O Captain My Captain
- Written on the passing of Abraham Lincoln
- Traditional Forms
- Traditional Subject
- Invoked in the last scene of Dead Poets Society
(boys on desk upon seeing their captain and
his passing)
- Use of repeated images, symbols, phrases, and
grammatical units - Use of enumerations and catalogs
- Use of anaphora (initial repetition) in lines and
Epanaphora (each line hangs by a loop from the
line before it) - Contrast and parallelism in paired lines
39Whitmans Use of Language
- Idiosyncratic spelling and punctuation.
- Words used for their sounds as much as their
sense foreign languages - Use of language from several disciplines
- The sciences anatomy, astronomy, botany
(especially the flora and fauna of America) - Businesses and professions, such as carpentry
- Military and war terms nautical terms
40Whats So Shocking about the Good Grey Poet
- Why were so many writers shocked by Whitman?
- His lack of regular rhyme and meter (free verse)
and nontraditional poetic style and subject
matter shocked more traditional writers. - He also wrote poetry with unabashedly sexual
imagery and themes, some of them homoerotic.
Examples include the Calamus poems and I Sing
the Body Electric.
41Whitmans Influence
- Along with Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman stands
as one of two giants of American poetry in the
nineteenth century. - Whitmans poetry would influence such Harlem
Renaissance writers as Langston Hughes and James
Weldon Johnson. - Whitman influenced Beat poets such as Allen
Ginsburg. - Chilean writer Pablo Neruda claimed to have been
influenced by Whitman. - Whitmans poetry was a model for French
symbolists, such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul
Verlaine, and Arthur Rimbaud. - Modernist poets such as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot,
and W.H. Auden were also influenced by Whitman. - Lets listen From Favorite Poem Project, Song
of Myself as read by Bostons John Doherty
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44Mark Twain and Realism