This document discusses different genres of 19th century American literature including Literary Realism, Naturalism, and Local Color. Realism aimed to accurately portray everyday American life and focused on middle class characters and settings. Naturalism applied scientific principles to the study of human behavior and depicted how social forces influence characters. Local Color, also called Regionalism, emphasized distinctive regional features like dialects, customs, and settings to capture the flavor of a particular area. Major writers associated with each genre are listed, along with their typical techniques and themes.

1. Literary Realism and sub genres
NATURALISM, AND LOCAL COLOR

2. Literary Realism
WRITERS ASSOCIATED WITH REALISM:
TWAIN
WHARTON
HOWELLS

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
• 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
• 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

6. Naturalism
WRITERS ASSOCIATED WITH NATURALISM:
CRANE
LONDON
BIERCE

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. Local Color - Regionalism
WRITERS ASSOCIATED WITH LOCAL COLOR/REGIONALISM:
FREEMAN
CHOPIN
TWAIN
WHARTON

12. 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

13. 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
• 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

14. 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