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- Realism significantly shaped modern literature by introducing a focus on authenticity in storytelling and character portrayal. Its emphasis on social commentary laid the groundwork for later movements like modernism, which further examined the complexities of human experience in rapidly changing societies.
Apr 20, 2024 · Realism gained momentum after the French Revolution of 1848. It was aimed at rejecting the values of Romanticism and history painting. Artists like Gustave Courbet turned to a more realistic approach to art that involved depicting day-to-day lives.
- Samuel Clemens
- Frontier Humor and Realism
- Local Colorists
- Midwestern Realism
- Cosmopolitan Novelists
- Naturalism and Muckraking
- The “Chicago School” of Poetry
- Two Women Regional Novelists
- The Rise of Black American Literature
- Back to Top of The Outline of American Literature Chapter 5
Samuel Clemens, better known by his pen name of Mark Twain, grew up in the Mississippi River frontier town of Hannibal, Missouri. Ernest Hemingway’s famous statement that all of American literature comes from one great book, Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, indicates this author’s towering place in the tradition. Early 19th-century American ...
Two major literary currents in 19th-century America merged in Mark Twain: popular frontier humor and local color, or “regionalism.” These related literary approaches began in the 1830s – and had even earlier roots in local oral traditions. In ragged frontier villages, on riverboats, in mining camps, and around cowboy campfires far from city amuseme...
Like frontier humor, local color writing has old roots but produced its best works long after the Civil War. Obviously, many pre-war writers, from Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne to John Greenleaf Whittier and James Russell Lowell, paint striking portraits of specific American regions. What sets the colorists apart is their self-conscio...
For many years, the editor of the important Atlantic Monthly magazine, William Dean Howells (1837-1920), published realistic local color writing by Bret Harte, Mark Twain, George Washington Cable, and others. He was the champion of realism, and his novels, such as A Modern Instance (1882), The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), and A Hazard of New Fortun...
Henry James (1843-1916) Henry James once wrote that art, especially literary art, “makes life, makes interest, makes importance.” James’s fiction and criticism is the most highly conscious, sophisticated, and difficult of its era. With Twain, James is generally ranked as the greatest American novelist of the second half of the 19th century. James i...
Wharton’s and James’s dissections of hidden sexual and financial motivations at work in society link them with writers who seem superficially quite different: Stephen Crane, Jack London, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Upton Sinclair. Like the cosmopolitan novelists, but much more explicitly, these naturalists used realism to relate the individ...
Three Midwestern poets who grew up in Illinois and shared the midwestern concern with ordinary people are Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, and Edgar Lee Masters. Their poetry often concerns obscure individuals; they developed techniques – realism, dramatic renderings – that reached out to a larger readership. They are part of the Midwestern, or Chica...
Novelists Ellen Glasgow (1873-1945) and Willa Cather (1873-1947)explored women’s lives, placed in brilliantly evoked regional settings. Neither novelist set out to address specifically female issues; their early works usually treat male protagonists, and only as they gained artistic confidence and maturity did they turn to depictions of women’s liv...
The literary achievement of African-Americans was one of the most striking literary developments of the post-Civil War era. In the writings of Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Charles Waddell Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and others, the roots of black American writing took hold, notably in the forms of autobiography, p...
EIL Editor’s Note: Remember that literary analysis is subjective, and the opinions expressed in this article below are the analysis of one particular writer, rather than the final word on how you should interpret these artists and their works. Each writer’s analysis is informed by his or her worldview, education, personal taste, and reading backgro...
Jun 14, 2024 · American realism in literature focuses on portraying everyday life and societal changes in a detailed and accurate manner. This guide explores the historical context, key themes, and prominent authors who shaped this literary movement from the late 19th to early 20th centuries.
Literary realism hit the scene late in the 19th century, and there was a dramatic shift in style. Instead of romanticized stories and scenes, literary realism was a literary movement that portrayed everyday life and experiences as they happened, with minimal symbolism but instead a focus on truthful storytelling.
Oct 30, 2023 · Social Realism in Literature. Through authentic and faithful representation, Social Realism offers a platform for marginalized voices, a vehicle for social critique, and a means to advocate for societal change.
Realism as a movement in literature was a post-1848 phenomenon, according to its first theorist Jules-Français Champfleury. It aims to reproduce "objective reality", and focuses on showing every day, quotidian activities and life, primarily among the middle- or lower-class society, without romantic idealization or dramatization. [6]
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William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and Henry James wrote prolifically about the Realistic method, where writers created characters and plot based on average people experiencing the common concerns of everyday life, and they also produced their own literary masterpieces using this style.
