American Realism aimed to depict everyday life and social realities in a realistic style through literature, art, and music in the late 19th century. As industrialization increased, so did immigration, trade, growth, and cultural expression captured through realist works. Mark Twain used colloquial language that helped define an American voice and works like Huckleberry Finn condemned racism. Henry James transitioned between realism and modernism with novels examining social dynamics and stream of consciousness writing. American Naturalism that emerged viewed humans as subject to deterministic forces beyond their control, as seen in Faulkner's Gothic story A Rose for Emily.

1. American Realism &
Naturalism
LECTURE 8

2. American Realism
 American Realism was a style in art, music and literature that
depicted contemporary social realities and the lives and everyday
activities of ordinary people. The movement began in literature in
the mid-19th century, and became an important tendency in visual
art in the early 20th century. Whether a cultural portrayal or a
scenic(decorative)view of downtown New York City, American
realist works attempted to define what was real.

3.  From the late 19th to the early 20th centuries, the United
States experienced huge industrial, economic, social and
cultural change.
 A continuous wave of European immigration and the rising
potential for international trade brought increasing growth and
prosperity to America. Through art and artistic expression
(through all mediums including painting, literature and music).
 American Realism attempted to portray the exhaustion and
cultural exuberance(wealth) of the figurative American
landscape and the life of ordinary Americans at home.

4. Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens)
 Early 19th-century American writers tended to be flowery, sentimental, or
ostentatious(proud) —partially because they were still trying to prove that
they could write as elegantly as the English.
 Twain's style, based on vigorous, realistic, colloquial American speech,
gave American writers a new appreciation of their national voice.
 Twain was the first major author to come from the interior of the country,
and he captured its distinctive, humorous slang and iconoclasm.
 For Twain and other American writers of the late 19th century, realism was
not merely a literary technique: It was a way of speaking truth and
exploding worn-out conventions. Twain is best known for his works
 Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
 Mark Twain’s 1885 novel condemning the
institutionalized racism of the pre-Civil War
South is among the most celebrated works
of American fiction.
 Twain’s story of a runaway boy and an
escaped slave’s travels on the Mississippi
plumbs the essential meaning of freedom.

6.  Quotes:
1- “You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by
the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no
matter.”
2- “The Widow Douglas she took me for her son, and allowed
she would civilize me; but it was rough living in the house all the
time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was
in all her ways; and so when I couldn’t stand it no longer I lit out.
I got into my old rags and my sugar-hogshead again, and was
free and satisfied.”
3-” Then she told me all about the bad place, and I said I wished
I was there.”

7. HENRY JAMES
 Regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary
modernism and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in
the English language. He was the son of Henry James Sr. and the brother of
renowned philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice
James.
 He is best known for a number of novels dealing with the social and marital
interplay between émigré Americans, English people, and continental
Europeans. Examples of such novels include The Portrait of a Lady, The
Ambassadors, and The Wings of the Dove.
 His later works were increasingly experimental. In describing the internal
states of mind and social dynamics of his characters, James often made use
of a style in which ambiguous or contradictory motives and impressions were
overlaid or juxtaposed in the discussion of a character's psyche.

8. HENRY JAMES
 stream of consciousness: is a narrative mode or method that
attempts "to depict the multitudinous thoughts and feelings
which pass through the mind" of a narrator.
 Stream of consciousness is a narrative device that attempts to
give the written equivalent of the character's thought processes,
either in a loose interior monologue or in connection to his or
her actions.
 Stream-of-consciousness writing is usually regarded as a
special form of interior monologue and is characterized by
associative leaps in thought and lack some or all punctuation.

9. American Naturalism
 American writers toward the close of the 19th century moved toward
naturalism, a more advanced stage of realism.
 Naturalism is a literary movement beginning in the late nineteenth century,
similar to literary realism in its rejection of Romanticism, but distinct in its
embrace of determinism, detachment, scientific objectivism, and social
commentary.
 Naturalism assumes that humans have little or no control over what happens
to them. The are unable to exercise free will to affect their situations and
have little control over what happens. Individuals are at the mercy of
external and internal forces which control their destinies(fate).
 Naturalistic works tend to see humans as the products of biological and/or
socio-economic determinisim. Like the realists, naturalists claim to present
their subjects objectively with no comment on the morality or the fairness of
what happens to the individual characters.

10. Features of Naturalism
 Objective presentation of subject; almost like scientific investigation/
esperimentation
 Rejection of supernatural explanations for situations or events
 Heavily influenced by the scientific theories of the time, particularly
Darwin's.
 Nature seen as essentially ambivalent to man at best, hostile to man at
worse
 Human beings are part of nature and subject to its laws--no spiritual force
or soul separates them from other animals
 Man as a product of his environment
 Man as a product of his heredity
 lack of free will

11. William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily
 William Faulkner's A Rose for Emily, a story about a woman who
killed her lover, is considered an example of a narrative within the
naturalism category.
 This story, which also used Gothic elements, presented a tale that
highlighted the extraordinary and excessive features in human
nature and the social environment that influences them.
 The protagonist, Miss Emily, was forced to lead an isolated life,
and that - combined with her mental illness - made insanity her
inevitable fate.
 Themes: Tradition versus Change& The Power of Death