This document discusses three major literary genres from the post-Civil War era: Literary Realism, Naturalism, and Local Color/Regionalism. Realism aimed to accurately portray everyday American life, focusing on middle-class characters and themes. Naturalism applied scientific principles to depict how social forces influence human behavior. Local Color writing emphasized distinctive regional settings, dialects, and customs. All three genres emerged as American society experienced rapid industrialization and immigration.
3. Literary Realism: Properties/Characteristics
• Realism is the primary, or overriding, literary genre from the post
Civil War era to about 1910.
• Realism is an attempt to record American life as it existed at the
time
• Deals with accurate representation and exploration of American
lives in various contexts - particularly changing American
cultural, social, and economic scene
• Focuses on the physical and tactile (sensual) world of characters
• Opposed to psychological/metaphysical/spiritual world of
Romantics/Transcendentalists
4. Realism:
• Technique of writing - Faithful representation of reality -
• Denotes a particular kind of subject matter & character – Realists center
attention on the immediate, the here and now, specific action and verifiable
consequences.
• Characters are ordinary – they represent everyday, generally middle class,
individuals
• Established uniquely/prototypical American protagonists
• Vernacular male hero – boy protagonist – Huck Finn
• All-American Girl
• Bewildered and anxious/stressed middle class family and business person
• Psychologically complicated citizens in an increasingly diverse
social/cultural America
5. Realism Characteristics:
• Renders reality closely and in comprehensive detail -
selective presentations of reality with an emphasis on
verisimilitude
• Complex ethical choices are often the subject - characters
become more important than plot
• Characters appear in their real complexity of temperament
and motive - they are in explicable relationship to nature,
themselves, each other, their social class and their own past
• Class is important - generally serves aspirations of middle
class
6. Characteristics cont.
• Events are usually plausible - avoid sensational and dramatic
elements of naturalism and romanticism
• Diction is natural vernacular - not heightened or poetic [i.e.
Huck Finn]
• Objectivity in presentation is extremely important
• Redemption of the individual is found within the social
context – world
8. Naturalism
• Literary Naturalism refers to writing that applies scientific
principles of objective observation to the study of human
behavior and characters within the context of their
surroundings.
• American literary Naturalism emerged during a time of
tremendous cultural and economic upheaval in the United
States. In the late nineteenth century, industrialization,
urbanization, mechanization, and immigration led to
seismic shifts in the American political, cultural, and social
landscape.
9. Naturalism
• Naturalist writers depicted these changing times by
chronicling the experiences of impoverished and uneducated
people--usually immigrants--living in squalor and struggling
to survive in an amoral and indifferent world.
• These writers strived to accurately portray human existence
by creating characters that are governed by forces of heredity
and environment, and viewed as victims of social Darwinism
and the American Dream.
• Writers in the Naturalist school rejected organized religion
and the concept of free will, instead focusing on how social
context and environment affect human interaction and
character development.
10. Naturalism
• Naturalism anticipates modernism – presents a new vision of
experience – insignificance of the forward movement of time
• Reaffirms the sanctity of the self & the emotional reality of
basic nature and act
• Debases the protagonist as a character from whom the reader
can learn something about human nature.
11. Character comparisons
Characters in Realism
• In progression of narrative
events – physical, psychological,
etc. – characters generally grow –
benefit from their experiences
Characters in Naturalism
• Confrontations / experiences
with the external world – world
beyond themselves – they fail to
learn or fail to understand what
they have experienced
• Search for identity – meaning in
their experiences – produces no
result – irony of naturalism;
characters remain unchanged.
12. Local Color - Regionalism
WRITERS ASSOCIATED WITH LOCAL COLOR/REGIONALISM:
FREEMAN
CHOPIN
TWAIN
WHARTON
13. Regionalism and Local Color - Characteristics
• Focuses on the characters - dialect - customs - topography and other
features particular to a specific region
• Local Color presents dual influences of romanticism and realism - the
author frequently looks away from ordinary life to distant lands -
strange customs - or exotic scenes but retains through the use of
minute detail loyalty and accuracy of description
• Customary form - short story or the "sketch"
• Some critics argue that regional - local color writing helped to unify
the country after the civil war and to the building of a national identity
- dominate form of writing between 1865 - 1900
14. Local Color Characteristics
• Setting - emphasis on nature and the limitations it imposes -
settings are often remote and/or inaccessible. Setting is integral
to the story and sometimes becomes a character in the story
• Characters - focus on characters of the district or region rather
than on individuals. Characters become character types -
sometimes quaint or stereotypical. Characters are marked by
their adherence to old ways - by dialect - by particular
personality traits peculiar to the region.
• Narrator - typically an educated observer from the world
beyond - narrator learns something about the characters while
preserving a sometimes sympathetic, sometimes ironic
distance. Serves as a moderator between the world of the
characters and urban audience of readers
15. Characteristics cont.
• Plots - common observation is that nothing happens in local
color stories by women authors - frequently nothing does
happen. Stories generally include lots of story telling and
revolve around the community and its rituals
• Themes - antipathy to change and nostalgia for an always
past golden age. Celebration of community and acceptance
in the face of adversity characterizes women's local color
stories - tension/conflict between rural and urban values is
often symbolized by the intrusion of an interloper who seeks
something from the community
16. Local Color Techniques
• Use of dialect to establish
credibility and authenticity
of characters
• Use of detailed description,
especially small, seemingly
insignificant details central
to the understanding of a
region
• Frequent use of the "frame
story" in which the
narrator hears some tale of
the region
Importance of Local Color writing
• Ended East Coast (New England) domination
of American literature
• Opened new parts of country – people and
geography for literature
• Introduced new languages (dialect and
vernacular) for rendering the American
experience: Immigrant; African-American;
Women
• Sentimentalized American past
• Cast local experience on a universal plain
• Opened way to social criticism and naturalism
