Postbellum American Literature |
|
ENG 221: Major American Authors By the end of this unit, you should:
Please
complete these assignments on or before the dates in bold.
Week 9: Regionalism Week 11: Realism and Naturalism ResourcesYou can find more information about the subjects covered in this lesson by consulting these resources: All
American: Stephen Crane features a biographical sketch,
chronology, study questions, and other information related to this author. Updated March 8, 2002
|
AnnouncementsWe turn now to the literature of postbellum America, specifically the works of Mark Twain, Mary Chesnut, Thomas Bangs Thorpe, Henry James, and Stephen Crane. Please note that I have made some changes in our schedule for the remainder of the semester. In particular, I have added a week to this unit to give us more time to spend on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and I have rescheduled some of your presentations. I also have added a deadline for your final portfolio: 8 a.m. April 15. Thus, you have about five weeks to write your remaining two essays, complete your author project, and generally put your entire portfolio into the best possible shape for my final evaluation. You then will have two weeks to study our remaining works, review the material we have covered this semester, and prepare for your final presentation, which will take place during the week of April 29. Between now and April 15, I will continue to meet with each of you for one-on-one conferences during our class meetings to check on your progress. Think FastBelow are some writing exercises designed to help you master the knowledge and skills covered in this unit.
DiscussionHistoryIf the antebellum period of American history was a time of seeking and becoming, the postbellum era was a time of seeing and being. The Civil War, which ended in 1865, had largely resolved the division between the northern and southern states, and the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 marked the fulfillment of the country's "manifest destiny," at least in practical terms. Now that the period of division and expansion was largely over, America began to take shape as its modern self: a pluralistic, industrialized, and commercial society. During Reconstruction, the period of rebuilding after the Civil War, the United States ratified constitutional amendments designed to end slavery and to secure citizenship and voting rights for black Americans. Meanwhile, women widened their role in the culture, and immigrants started to flood into the United States. Between 1870 and 1910, some 16 million people immigrated to America from Ireland, Germany, Italy, and other countries, many of them coming through Ellis Island in New York. Many Native Americans, on the other hand, remained on the margins, having been forced from their homes onto reservations. Over the course of the postbellum period, as well as the ensuing modern era, these various groups overcame Jim Crow laws, the Ku Klux Klan, and other forms of oppression and persecution on their way to entering and diversifying the American mainstream. Many of these "new" Americans helped to shape the new America by going to work in factories and stores. Despite Thomas Jefferson's early hope that America would be an agrarian paradise, the United States now was clearly an industrial and commercial country. Americans such as Andrew Carnegie and Cornelius Vanderbilt made fortunes in the steel, railroad, and other industries. Like diversification, industrialization brought both adversity and growth as a strong labor movement developed to cope with poor working conditions, child labor, and other problems. Some cornerstones of modern American culture were laid between the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the beginning of World War I in 1914. As the modern populace and economy took shape, so did modern technology, transportation, and recreation. Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the telephone and Thomas Edison's work in the areas of lighting, the phonograph, and the motion picture revolutionized the culture perhaps more than anything else, setting the stage for the information age to come. Similarly, the Wright brothers and Henry Ford laid the foundations for modern transportation by developing the airplane and automobile. Even many modern forms of recreation took shape as Coney Island emerged as a popular amusement park, and spectator sports--especially baseball, boxing, automobile racing, and rowing--became major forms of entertainment. LiteratureWhereas Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson and other antebellum writers in some ways detached themselves from the world around them, nearly all of the major postbellum writers immersed themselves in it. As journalists, Rebecca Harding Davis, William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and others traveled widely and came in close contact with real people, including some who were suffering the negative effects of industrialization and urbanization. Mark Twain's career as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River gave him similar contact with the world. Equally immersed in the culture were these writers' works, which they published in magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly and in subscription books sold door to door. These writers' worldly experiences and perspectives shaped the postbellum period's three major literary movements: realism, regionalism, and naturalism. Reacting against the extravangances of literary romance, which recounted the glorious adventures of larger-than-life characters, the realists tried to portray life accurately rather than idealistically. A character in Howells's novel The Rise of Silas Lapham states the realists' credo when he points out that "the novelists would be best to us if they painted life as it is." Thus, Howells, Twain, and Henry James depicted the aspirations, conflicts, and triumphs of convincing characters, such as a coarse orphan, a simple businessman, or a young woman in search of her identity. The writers of regional fiction, sometimes called "local color," also strove for authenticity. Capitalizing on the popularity of magazines, Bret Harte, Kate Chopin, and many other writers used details of landscape, dialect, and character to transport readers to distant, exotic American locales, such as the West, New Orleans, and the rural South. Finally, French naturalism, which depicts realistic characters struggling with social and other forces, caught on in America perhaps because the journalistic experiences of Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser put them in touch with the struggles of lower-class figures. Think AgainChoose one of the topics below and respond to it in a clear, thorough, detailed, and insightful 500-word essay. Include each essay in your portfolio.
|