Realism, Naturalism & Regionalism in American

Literature1865-1914

"the smaller details of everyday life, things that are likely to happen between lunch and supper."

Historical Context• Population of the United States is growing rapidly.

• Science, industry and transportation are expanding.

• Literature also was growing, but most new writers were not Romantics or Transcendentalists. They are Realists.

• The “Frontier” did not exist as before; its legacy changed and impacted Realists in its new form.

• The aftermath of the Civil War meant that Americans were less certain and optimistic about the future.

• The idealism of the Romantics and philosophy of Transcendentalists seemed out of date and irrelevant to many readers.

Literary Style and Concerns

• Capturing the commonplace

• Writing in vernacular and local dialect

• Local stories

Realism in American Literature

• The purpose of the writing is “to instruct and to entertain”

• Character is more important than plot. (Ordinary characters)

• Subject matter is drawn from real life experience.

• The realists reject symbolism and romanticizing of subjects.

• Settings are usually those familiar to the author.

• Plots emphasized “the norm of daily experience”

The Roots of American Realism– Rejects the idealized presentations,

imaginative settings, the supernatural, and the improbable plot twists of Romanticism.

– The experience of war- little interest in imaginative / romantic literature

– Frontier life (conflicts with Native Americans, the hardships of pioneer life)

– The urban experience (cities with poverty, slums, crime)

Driven by scientific and technological changes (see it believe it) The camera captured reality (i.e. Matthew Brady’s Civil War photographs)

Naturalism-A type of realism• Naturalists view individuals as

being at the mercy of biological and socioeconomic forces, whereas realists hold that humans have some degree of free will that they can exercise to affect their situations. Things happen to people, as if they were marionettes whose movements are entirely determined by forces beyond their control.

Characters are dominated by external or internal forces:

• Environmental– A storm, or a character lost at sea• Social conditions– A character born into poverty.• Chance (fate)– A character’s child is suddenly stricken with

typhoid fever.• Internal Passions– Lust, greed, or desire for dominance or pleasure

overcome rational behavior

Subject Matter

• Generally deals with raw and unpleasant experiences which reduce characters to "degrading" behavior as they struggle to survive.

• Characters are mostly from the lower-middle or lower classes--generally poor, uneducated, and unsophisticated.

Regionalism in American Literature

• About “local flavor” or “local color”

• “Local color” means a reliance on minor details and dialects.

• Focuses on characters, dialect, customs, landscapes, and other features specific to a certain region (eg. the South)

Local Color

• Helped build a national identity• The emphasis is frequently on nature and the

limitations it imposes; settings are frequently remote and inaccessible. The setting is integral to the story and may sometimes become a character in itself.

• Local color stories tend to be concerned with the character of a district or region rather than with the individual: characters may become character types, sometimes quaint or stereotypical.