Realism (The transformation of the nation) Historical background: Time: 1865-1900 Historical events: End of the Civil war (1865) Spanish American War (1898),

America during realism: • Flow of immigrants (west of the Appalachians and Alleghenies continent was peopled and exploited). • Vast stands of timber were consumed, numberless herds of buffalo and other game gave way to cattle, sheep, farms, villages, and cities. • Industrialization, urbanization • Between Civil War and the First World War the country was wholly transformed. Civil war left the country morally exhausted. • People were forced to accept the Darwin’s theory of evolution and profound changes in its own social institutions and cultural values. • First transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, • Agricultural productivity increased dramatically • Electricity was introduced in a larger scale (new means of communication such as the telephone revolutionized many aspects of daily life). • Coal, oil, iron, gold, silver and other kinds of mineral wealth were discovered

Intellectual background: • The rapid transcontinental settlement and these new urban industrial circumstances were accompanied by the development of a national literature of great abundance(obfitość) and variety, • By 1875, American writers were moving toward realism in literature. • In France realism was a very serious literary movement. Such French novelists as Zola were changing the relationship between literature and society. For them, realism was an ideology and the novel had the power to become political weapon. • New themes, new forms, new subjects, new regions, new authors, new audiences emerged in the literature of this half century. • American writers wrote to earn money, fame, change the world. • Three figures that dominated prose fiction in the last quarter of the 19th century: Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Henry James. • William Dean Howells - the editor, correspondent, friend and champion of M. Twain and H. James and the most influential realism writer. He created the first theory for American realism. Under him the realism became the ‘mainstream’ of American literature. • Mark Twain was the most popular out of this three, but he was never a pure realists. He had a rare ability to convert the humor of stage performance into written language. He makes nearly all of his readers laugh out loud. He was incapable of writing-or speaking- a dull sentence. He was the master of style. Throughout all of Twain’s writing, we see the conflict between the ideals of Americans and their desire for money. He never tried to solve that conflict. He was not an intellectual, he was like a newspaperman who reports what he sees. His humor was rather childish. ‘Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885’) is his masterpiece and the fountainhead of American colloquial prose. Twain was critisised that his psychology was really only child psychology. In ‘Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ Twain moved also the adult problems. Many people sees it as a great novel of American democracy. It shows the basic goodness and wisdom of ordinary people. Ernest Hemingway whose style is based on Twain’s once said ‘All modern American literature comes from Huckleberry Finn’. Other important Twain’s works: ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’ (story about ‘bad boys’- a popular theme in American literature ‘Life on the Mississippi’ (based on his romantic memories)

• Henry James – a realist but not a naturalist. Unlike Howard and the naturalists, he was not interested in business, politics or the conditions of society. He was the observer of the mind (psychological realism). Things happen to his characters but not as a result of their own actions. They watch life more than live it. He was interested in how their minds respond to the events of the story. His brother William James, gave this literature genre a name. He called it ‘stream of consciousness literature’. Thanks to modern psychology and writers like Henry James we are now more interested in the working of our mind. He thought that the writer should use language to probe the deepest reaches of the psychological and moral nature of human beings. He believed that the best fiction illuminates life by revealing it as an immensely (niesamowicie) complex process. He is the realist of the inner life, a dramatizer and was always on the side of freedom. Important works: ‘Daisy Miller’, ‘Washington Square’ Common themes and elements: • Pragmatism (pragmatists consider thought to be a product of the interaction between organism and environment) • literature of the common-place • attempts to represent real life • ordinary people–poor and middle class • ordinary speech in dialect- use of vernacular (regionalny) • recent or contemporary life • subject matter presented in an unidealized, unsentimentalized way • democratic function of literature • social criticism–effect on audience is key • presents indigenous American life • importance of place–regionalism, “local color” • sociology and psychology

Naturalism (1880-1930):

• Writers were greatly influenced by Emile Zola’s ‘scientific study of man, by Darwin’s theory of evolution and by the ideas of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, which attacked Christianity. • Traditional values had been based on the idea of individual responsibility: the individual must choose between good and evil. But now writers were asking whether an individual could really make such a choice. Nietzsche suggested that were also forces which worked inside the individual. Each person has a ‘will to power’. This will is ‘beyond good and evil’. It is a force of nature like hunger, or sex. • The Naturalist believed in studying human beings as though they were “products” that are to be studied impartially, without moralizing about their natures. • “The conflict in naturalistic novels is often ‘man against nature’ or ‘man against himself’. Nature is indifferent to man. The universe is deterministic • Naturalism is generally pessimistic. Naturalists observe then write. Often about the black, darker side of life. Common themes and elements: • 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 seen as an animal driven by instinct • Behavior is determined more by instinct than by reason, • Chance, Fate, Destiny • lack of free will • Nihilism • Fatatilism, • Nature as a dominant image contributing heavily to character and themes Major writers: • Stephen Crane, • Frank Norris, • Jack London, • Theodore Dreiser,