19TH CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE

Prepared by: Ahmed Sosal A.

Historical background

The civil war

Top Five Causes of the Civil War: Economic and social differences between the North

and the South: The South was based on the plantation system(agriculture) while

the North was focused on city life(industery). This disparity between the two set up a major difference in economic attitudes. This change in the North meant that society evolved as people of different cultures and classes had to work together. On the other hand, the South continued to hold onto an antiquated social order.

States versus federal rights: Since the time of the Revolution, two camps emerged: those

arguing for greater states rights and those arguing that the federal government needed to have more control.

The fight between Slave and Non-Slave State Proponents:

As America began to expand, first with the lands gained from the Louisiana Purchase and later with the Mexican War, an argument of whether new states admitted to the union would be slave or free aroused.

Growth of the Abolition Movement:Increasingly, the northerners became more polarized against slavery. Sympathies began to grow for abolitionists and against slavery and slaveholders. This occurred especially after some major events such as the passage of the fugitive slave act that held individuals responsible for harboring fugitive slaves even if they were located in non-slave states.The election of Abraham Lincoln:Even though things were already coming to a head, when Lincoln was elected in 1860, South Carolina issued its "Declaration of the Causes of Secession." They believed that Lincoln was anti-slavery and in favor of Northern interests so seven states had seceded from the Union followed by more four ones.As a consequence of these factors, the Southern states were determined to retain slavery after the Revolution. Thus began the fatal division between "free states" and "slave states" that led to sectionalism and, ultimately, to civil war.

SlaveryAbraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863 was a masterful propaganda tactic, but in truth, it proclaimed free only those slaves outside the control of the Federal government--that is, only those in areas still controlled by the Confederacy. The legal end to slavery in the nation came in December 1865 when the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified, it declared.

Smtuer fordThe beginning of the civil war 1861

U.S. MAPShows the slave status 1789-1861

The Gettysburg Battle

U.S. Immediately before the civil war

Slavery Abuse

President Lincoln and other leadersDuring the preparation for the war

Battle field in the West

Confederate soldiers

A Union Army soldier in a prison 1865

Andersonville National Cemetery

Transcendentalism

Transcendentalism is a group of ideas in literature and philosophy that developed in the 1830s and '40s as a protest against the general state of culture and society, and in particular, the state of intellectualism. Among transcendentalists' core beliefs was the belief in an ideal spirituality that "transcends" the physical and empirical and is realized only through the individual's intuition, rather than through the doctrines of established religions.

During the 1830s, Ralph Waldo Emerson established himself as the spokesman for transcendentalism, first set forth in his essay Nature (1836). The group known as the transcendentalists that gathered around him inConcord, Mass., included Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, Theodore Parker, and William Ellery Channing, who joined with Emerson in the publication of The Dial magazine (1840-44). They subscribed to Emerson's faith that all people are united in their communion with the oversoul, a postreligious equivalent of God. Each individual, Emerson said, finds his or her own way to transcendence through self-knowledge, self-reliance, and the contemplation of nature.

Literary Schools

Realism Realism broadly defined as "the faithful representation

of reality" or "verisimilitude," realism is a literary technique practiced by many schools of writing. Although strictly speaking, realism is a technique, it also denotes a particular kind of subject matter, especially the representation of middle-class life.

The causes of the rise of realism: The reaction against romanticism, the interest in scientific method, the systematizing of the study of documentary

history, and The influence of rational philosophy.

In American literature, the term "realism" encompasses the period from the Civil War to the turn of the century during which William Dean Howells, Rebecca Harding Davis, Henry James, Mark Twain, and others wrote fiction devoted to accurate representation and an exploration of American lives in various contexts.

•Definitions of Realism:"Realism sets itself at work to consider characters and events which are apparently the most ordinary and uninteresting, in order to extract from these their full value and true meaning”George Parsons.“Realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.”William Dean Howells."Realism, n. The art of depicting nature as it is seen by toads. The charm suffusing a landscape painted by a mole, or a story written by a measuring-worm." Ambrose Bierce.

•Characteristics of Realism:•Renders reality closely and in comprehensive detail.•Character is more important than action and plot; complex ethical choices are often the subject.•Characters appear in their real complexity of temperament and motive; they are in explicable relation to nature, to each other, to their social class, to their own past.•Class is important; the novel has traditionally served the interests and aspirations of an insurgent middle class.•Events will usually be plausible. Realistic novels avoid the sensational, dramatic elements of naturalistic novels and romances.•Diction is natural vernacular, not heightened or poetic; tone may be comic, satiric, or matter-of-fact.•Objectivity in presentation becomes increasingly important.

NaturalismNaturalism was a literary movement taking place from 1880s to 1940s that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character. It was depicted as a literary movement that seeks to replicate a believable everyday reality, as opposed to movements such as Romanticism or Surrealism, in which subjects may receive highly symbolic, idealistic, or even supernatural treatment.

Naturalism was a method of writing where the application of methods of science was philosophically used to describe humans. Through this method writers felt they could further understand human beings. Naturalistic authors attempted to explain human's behavior by their hereditary traits or the very environment people were raised.

Naturalistic writers were influenced by Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. They believed that one's heredity and social environment determine one's character. Whereas realism seeks only to describe subjects as they really are, naturalism also attempts to determine "scientifically" the underlying forces (e.g. the environment or heredity) influencing the actions of its subjects.Naturalistic works exposed the dark harshness of life, including poverty, racism, sex, violence, prejudice, disease, corruption, prostitution, and filth. As a result, naturalistic writers were frequently criticized for being too blunt.American naturalism must be defined rather more loosely, as a reaction against the realist fiction of the 1870s and 1880s, whose scope was limited to middle-class or "local color" topics, with taboos on sexuality and violence.

•Characteristics of Naturalism:There are defining characteristics of literary naturalism as follows:•Pessimism: Very often, one or more characters will continue to repeat one line or phrase that tends to have a pessimistic connotation, sometimes emphasizing the inevitability of death.•Detachment from the story: The author often tries to maintain a tone that will be experienced as 'objective.' This puts the focus on the plot and what happens to the character, rather than the characters themselves.•Determinism, which is the opposite of the notion of free will.•Surprising twist at the end of the story. Equally, there tends to be in naturalist novels and stories a strong sense that nature is indifferent to human struggle.In the United States, the genre is associated principally with writers such as Abraham Cahan, Stephen Crane, Ellen Glasgow, David Graham Phillips, John Steinbeck, Jack London, Edith Wharton, and most prominently Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser.