1. American Realism:

2. The Most Important Event:

3. The Most Important Person:

4. Walt Whitman’s Prediction
“A great literature will arise out of the era of those four years”
--Walt Whitman
Almost none of the great American writers saw battle. Almost no one who fought wrote about it.
The great book of the Civil War was written by a man who was not born until six years after the war had ended: Stephen Crane

5. A response to the Civil War
Idealism
Whitman: “Future years will never know the seething hell and the background of countless minor scenes and interiors … and it is best they should not—the real war will never get in the books.”
The urbanization and industrialization of America
As a reaction to Romanticism
Increasing rates of democracy and literacy
The emerging middle class
Upheaval and social change in the latter half of the 19th century

6. Realism as a Reaction to Romanticism
No more:
Idealized escapes into nature
Imaginative descriptions of the evil of the human soul
Essays on “Romantic Ideals”

7. The Rise of Realism
Realism defined: Literature written from approximately that aims at a Verisimilitude (truthfulness) to the common course of ordinary life.
Subjects are taken from
Slums
Factories
Corruption of politics
Prostitution
Slavery

8. Realist Writers Mark Twain William Dean Howells Henry James
Edgar Lee Masters

9. Regionalism ”Local Color” Dialects, settings, characters, customs,
Other features specific to a certain region
i.e. The American South, The West
The trickster
Coincided with Realism and shared many of the same traits.
Prominent from

10. Regional Writers Kate Chopin—South Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman—New England
Mark Twain—West
Willa Cather—Midwest

11. Naturalism A subset of realism that
Claims to portray life exactly as it is, with detachment and objectivity
Relies heavily on the growing scientific disciplines of psychology and sociology
Attempts to dissect human behavior with objectivity
Is super-influenced by Charles Darwin
Believes that human behavior is determined by heredity and environment
Sees human beings as subject to natural forces beyond their control

12. Naturalist Writers Stephen Crane Ambrose Bierce Jack London
Katherine Anne Porter
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Edith Wharton

13. Things to remember. . .
Realism, Regionalism, and Naturalism are intertwined and connected.
Their influence has dominated most literature created since 1860.
They are truly American modes of writing.