American Realism


HISTORY OF AMERICAN REALISM
After the Civil War, the vision of the Romantic America (Cooper's Last of the Mohicans) had disappeared because of the expansion to the West ("Manifest Destiny") and because the cultural center of the USA moved from Boston to New York (which represented modernity).
(The history of American realismhttps://www.skyminds.net/19th-century-realism-naturalism/)
Harriet Beecher-Stowe (1811-1896) used to write children's books. She wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852, which was a pamphlet against slavery from a Christian and sentimental point of view. African Americans saw it as a paternalistic portray, not realistic at all. Its aim was to draw people against slavery and indirected started the Civil War.
(The history of American realismhttps://www.skyminds.net/19th-century-realism-naturalism/)
Mark Twain (1835-1910) is Samuel Clemens' nom de plume. He was mainly a humorist with a strong regionalist tradition and used the vernacular (the language people speak) as well as western tell-tales as inspirations. He successfully represented the spirit of the post civil war America with The Guilded Age (1873), a satire of the "robber barons", and Life on the Mississippi (1883) when he was a steamboat pilot.
(The history of American realismhttps://www.skyminds.net/19th-century-realism-naturalism/)

DEFINITION OF REALISM IN AMERICA
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. A reaction against romanticism, an interest in scientific method, the systematizing of the study of documentary history, and the influence of rational philosophy all affected the rise of realism. According to William Harmon and Hugh Holman, "Where romanticists transcend the immediate to find the ideal, and naturalists plumb the actual or superficial to find the scientific laws that control its actions, realists center their attention to a remarkable degree on the immediate, the here and now, the specific action, and the verifiable consequence" (A Handbook to Literature 428).
(The definition of American realismrealism://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/realism.htm)

Many critics have suggested that there is no clear distinction between realism and its related late nineteenth-century movement, naturalism. As Donald Pizer notes in his introduction to The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism: Howells to London, the term "realism" is difficult to define, in part because it is used differently in European contexts than in American literature. Pizer suggests that "whatever was being produced in fiction during the 1870s and 1880s that was new, interesting, and roughly similar in a number of ways can be designated as realism, and that an equally new, interesting, and roughly similar body of writing produced at the turn of the century can be designated as naturalism" (5). Put rather too simplistically, one rough distinction made by critics is that realism espousing a deterministic philosophy and focusing on the lower classes is considered naturalism.
(The definition of American realismrealism://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/realism.htm)

In American literature, the term "realism" encompasses the period of time 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. As the United States grew rapidly after the Civil War, the increasing rates of democracy and literacy, the rapid growth in industrialism and urbanization, an expanding population base due to immigration, and a relative rise in middle-class affluence provided a fertile literary environment for readers interested in understanding these rapid shifts in culture. In drawing attention to this connection, Amy Kaplan has called realism a "strategy for imagining and managing the threats of social change" (Social Construction of American Realism ix).
(The definition of American realismrealism://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/realism.htm)
Realism was a movement that encompassed the entire country, or at least the Midwest and South, although many of the writers and critics associated with realism (notably W. D. Howells) were based in New England. Among the Midwestern writers considered realists would be Joseph Kirkland, E. W. Howe, and Hamlin Garland; the Southern writer John W. DeForest's Miss Ravenal's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty is often considered a realist novel, too.
(The definition of American realismrealism://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/realism.htm)

CHARACTERISTIC OF AMERICAN REALISM
(from Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition)
-Renders reality closely and in comprehensive detail. Selective presentation of reality with an emphasis on verisimilitude, even at the expense of a well-made plot
-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. (See Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel)
-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: overt authorial comments or intrusions diminish as the century progresses.
-Interior or psychological realism a variant form.
-In Black and White Strangers, Kenneth Warren suggests that a basic difference between realism and sentimentalism is that in realism, "the redemption of the individual lay within the social world," but in sentimental fiction, "the redemption of the social world lay with the individual" (75-76).
(The characteristic of American  realism://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/realism.htm)

FIGURE IN AMERICAN REALISM
1.  WILLA CATHER
Cather, another Virginian, grew up on the Nebraska prairie among pioneering immigrants -- later immortalized in O Pioneers! (1913), My Antonia (1918), and her well-known story "Neighbour Rosicky" (1928). During her lifetime she became increasingly alienated from the materialism of modern life and wrote of alternative visions in the American Southwest and in the past. Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) evokes the idealism of two 16th-century priests establishing the Catholic Church in the New Mexican desert. Cather's works commemorate important aspects of the American experience outside the literary mainstream -- pioneering, the establishment of religion, and women's independent lives.
(FIGURE of American realismhttp://www.let.rug.nl/usa/outlines/literature-1991/authors/henry-james.php)
2.  STEPHEN CARANE
Stephen Crane, born in New Jersey, had roots going back to Revolutionary War soldiers, clergymen, sheriffs, judges, and farmers who had lived a century earlier. Primarily a journalist who also wrote fiction, essays, poetry, and plays, Crane saw life at its rawest, in slums and on battlefields. His short stories -- in particular, "The Open Boat," "The Blue Hotel," and "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" -- exemplified that literary form. His haunting Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage, was published to great acclaim in 1895, but he barely had time to bask in the attention before he died, at 29, having neglected his health. He was virtually forgotten during the first two decades of the 20th century, but was resurrected through a laudatory biography by Thomas Beer in 1923. He has enjoyed continued success ever since -- as a champion of the common man, a realist, and a symbolist.
(FIGURE of American realismhttp://www.let.rug.nl/usa/outlines/literature-1991/authors/henry-james.php
3. JACK LONDON
A poor, self-taught worker from California, the naturalist Jack London was catapulted from poverty to fame by his first collection of stories, The Son of the Wolf (1900), set largely in the Klondike region of Alaska and the Canadian Yukon. Other of his best-sellers, including The Call of the Wild (1903) and The Sea-Wolf (1904) made him the highest paid writer in the United States of his time.
The autobiographical novel Martin Eden (1909) depicts the inner stresses of the American dream as London experienced them during his meteoric rise from obscure poverty to wealth and fame. Eden, an impoverished but intelligent and hardworking sailor and laborer, is determined to become a writer. Eventually, his writing makes him rich and well-known, but Eden realizes that the woman he loves cares only for his money and fame. His despair over her inability to love causes him to lose faith in human nature. He also suffers from class alienation, for he no longer belongs to the working class, while he rejects the materialistic values of the wealthy whom he worked so hard to join. He sails for the South Pacific and commits suicide by jumping into the sea. Like many of the best novels of its time, Martin Eden is an unsuccess story. It looks ahead to F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby in its revelation of despair amid great wealth.
(FIGURE of American realismhttp://www.let.rug.nl/usa/outlines/literature-1991/authors/henry-james.php
Jack London Works literation
Novels
A Daughter of the Snows (1902)
Children of the Frost (1902)
The Call of the Wild (1903)
The Kempton-Wace Letters (1903)
The Sea-Wolf (1904)
The Game (1905)
White Fang (1906)
Before Adam (1907)
The Iron Heel (1908)
Martin Eden (1909)
Burning Daylight (1910)
Adventure (1911)
The Scarlet Plague (1912)
The Abysmal Brute (1913)
The Valley of the Moon (1913)
The Mutiny of the Elsinore (1914)
The Star Rover (1915)
The Little Lady of the Big House (1916)
Jerry of the Islands (1917)
Michael, Brother of Jerry (1917)
Hearts of Three (1920)
The Assassination Bureau, Ltd (1963,
Short story
Tales of the Fish Patrol (1906)
Smoke Bellew (1912)
The Turtles of Tasman (1916)
(https://id.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_London)
The most popular literary work of jack londom is his novel, The Call Of The Wild, tells the story of the adventures of a survivor in the wilderness of Alaska.
The Call of the Wild was first published serially by the Saturday Evening Post in 1903. When the first edition was published, the work was very well received by readers and literary critics. Jack chose a writing technique that was very unusual in his time. He described the story from the point of view of a snow train towing dog named Buck. Buck experiences 'Atavism' a state in which animals return to their basic nature - which can be seen as an allegory for the human state.
( https://m.kumparan.com/potongan-nostalgia/karya-jack-london-tahun-1903-menghancurkan-dominasi-aliran-romantisme-1537534572707955800.amp)


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