American Realism
Note：The two-stage development of realism
❖ Time span: 1865-1918
I：Before the 1890s
William Dean Howells
The forerunner of realism who moulds the public taste and spreads the credo of realism through writing ; genteel realism; middle-class oriented
Henry James
Forerunner of psychological realism; middle- and high-class oriented
Mark Twain
Representative of local colorism; distinctive for his frontier humor and brilliant adoption of colloquial style; low-class oriented
1. Having such quality of texture and background that it could not have been written in any other place or by anyone else than a native.
Texture: elements which characterize a local culture, such as speech, customs, and mores peculiar to one particular place Background: physical setting and those distinctive qualities of landscape which condition human thought and behavior
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Social background of American in its 70s and 80s
After the Civil War (1861-1865), capitalist America witnesses the looming of a gilded age rather than a golden age
❖ Life: a veritable struggle for survival
❖ Basic tone: widely felt disillusionment and frustration
The Age of Realism
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The features of realistic writing style
❖ Major themes: exaggeration of actual events, related as if it were true and factual; humorously exaggerated fictional stories of the backwoods exploits of an American frontiersman; the origins of lakes, mountains, and canyons; the superhuman exploits of western cowboy
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Note: American tall tale from which Colorism derives
❖ Origin: a fundamental element of American folk literature; Originating in the 1820s, seen in the bragging contests that often occurred when the rough men of the American frontier gathered; essentially an oral form of entertainment; remaining popular now.
❖ Features distinguished from myths: ❖ Contemporarily relevant with a sense of
reality; Humorous for entertainment; Exaggeration and imagination looming large; Colloquial speech
❖ Simon Wheeler backed me into a corner and blockaded me there with his chair, and then sat me down and reeled off the monotonous narrative which follows this paragraph. He never smiled, he never frowned, he never changed his voice from the gentle-flowing key to which he tuned the initial sentence, he never betrayed the slightest suspicion of enthusiasm; but all through the interminable narrative there ran a vein of impressive earnestness and sincerity, which showed me plainly that, so far from his imagining that there was any thing ridiculous or funny about his story, he regarded it as a ❖ really important matter, and admired its two heroes as men of transcendent genius in finesse. To me, the spectacle of a man drifting serenely along through such a queer yarn without ever smiling, was exquisitely absurd. As I said before, I asked him to tell me what he knew of Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley, and he replied as follows. I let him go on in his own way, and never interrupted him once:
❖verisimilitude of detail derived from observation
❖The effort to approach the norm of experience– a reliance on the representative in plot, setting and character
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Note：The two-stage development of realism
❖ Time span: 1865-1918
II：After the 1890s
American Naturalism
Stephan Crane
Frank Norris
Theodore Dreiser
2. The ultimate aim of the local colorists: the create the illusion of an indigenous little world with qualities that tell it apart from the world outside.
adoption of colloquial style; low-class oriented
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Note: American local colorism
❖ Time span: roughly from late 1860s to 1900s ❖ Definition:
Colloquial style:
“It is a book from which All Amቤተ መጻሕፍቲ ባይዱrican literature comes.”
The frontier tall-tale tradition and American local colorism
Mark Twain
Representative of local colorism; distinctive for his frontier humor and brilliant
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Extract from The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County by Mark Twain
❖ There was a feller here once by the name of Jim Smiley, in the winter of '49 or may be it was the
❖ Heading for industrialization: the deterioration in public morality; public lust for wealth and power
❖ Extremes of wealth and poverty: the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few