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Module 3: Beyond the Civil War - Realism & Naturalism - Coggle Diagram
Module 3: Beyond the Civil War - Realism & Naturalism
After the Civil War
ambivalence condensed in term "Gilded Age"
(Mark Twain's novel of 1873)
Time after the abolition of slavery and the liberation of enslaved people
segregation and racism
schools, buses, water coolers etc.
Jim Crow
1896: Plessy vs. Ferguson: Supreme Court - segregation as constitutional ( -> 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education)
1920
"A man was lynched yesterday"
The Association started using this flag to mark/show the lynchings of black people in the United States
Stopped after the NAACP landlord threatened that they would evict the NAACP of they continued the flag
1862 Homestead Act: 160 acres of land would be given to any individual who payed a ten dollar registration fee and lived on the land for five years and cultivate it
largest migration of American history
infrastructure
railroad, telegraphs etc.
West constructed as a place of New Beginnings, as a space where individualism could be pursued without social restrictions
West constructed as a traditionally White and male space
2nd half of the 19th century
modern mass productions
establishment of Monopolys
industrialisation
consumerism
mail-order catalogs
competition, capitalism
American businessmen as a cultural hero
Andrew Carnegie
Steel
John D. Rockefeller
Oil
from rags to riches
mass immigration
1892: Ellis Island - Europe
1910: Angel Island - Asia
multicultural society
many immigrants moved into urban areas
hopes and situation of immigrants on Ellis Island (1912), near New York City
Immigrants on an Atlantic Liner. Leverick
U.S. inspectors examining eyes of immigrants, Ellis Island, New York Harbor. Underwood & Underwood, c. 1913
ideologies
-> Frederick Jackson Turner's "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" (1893): democracy, individualism/community,freedom, 'American' virtues
-> rise of the (white) myth of the West
frontier experience is key to understanding American History and Life
Supposedly the frontier experience produced and shaped the practical and self-reliant people who value individualism, freedom and democracy because they have experienced all that first hand in the West
the frontier is where true democracy is born, a space for fusion of individualism of community, the frontier is the sight and the gradle of American virtues and systems of government
The further westward expansion bring in the final phase in the destruction of Native American tribes/indigenous cultures
the number of industrial workers between 1860-1900 grows from 885,000 to 3,200,000
many of these workers are poor workers and exploits unskilled/cheap workers
poor living conditions/tenement housing in the city
see Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives and Stephen Crane, Maggie
moral corruption, fraud destructions
age that is not interested in truly being golden but an age that stresses materialism
Literary Movements
Local Color/Regional Literatures:
1830s
full bloom 1870-1900
realism
local
:
people
language
history
landscape/nature
forms/conventions:
mostly brief prose
sketches, tales, prose
tells the history of specific places and people / local nature and landscapes
Political implication
national and cultural politics
support regional empowerment
helps to empower other regions than the east which has been dominant at that time
In terms of race, esp. southern color writing popularizes and perpetuates stereotypes of African Americans
Some exceptions like Harris, which confronts Eastern readers with the realities of African American folk culture
Local color texts serve women writers to promote a feminist agenda, plays an important role in works from:
Chopin, Freeman, Cook
write about part. regions and fuse it with a feminist agenda
part of an Agenda of social criticism
precursor of realism and naturalism
important for further development of the short story and women's writing, important to bring humor into literature. brings the vernacular common speech into literature
includes topics and materials from all walks of life (folklore, immigrants, African Americans, Native Americans, Oral Tradition)
foreshadows even later developments, foreshadows modernist regional literature and supports the internationalization of American Literature
representatives and regions
New England
Sarah Orne Jewett(1849-1909)
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)
South
Mary N. Murfree(1850-1922)
Kate Chopin (1851-1904)
West
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Midwest
Zona Gale (1871-1938)
(New York)
Brander Matthews (1852-1929)
American Realism (1860-1914)
post-Civil War America > 'realistic', authentic representation
Natural sciences
regions
realist modes in visual culture: photography
first technologies became prominent in the 1830s and 1840s
1860s Camera became mobile
photography became popular with a claim for realism, immediacy and authentic representations (for. ex. historical changes for the nation)
Matthew Brady who produced several thousands of pictures
"Harvest of Death" (July 1863)
relative few numbers of Civil War paintings is claimed to be due to the impact of Brady's images
American realist writers
diversity <> common concerns
professional, can live from what they write
interested in representing reality and defining and influencing reality vs. naturalists who do not believe that you can improve things
prefer the novel (vs. romance)
they like to focus on what is probable and ordinary
novel of manners
stresses speech, norms, standards, manners, conventions, dresses etc. of a social group at a particular moment
Reject formulaic Happy Endings and easy closures for stories
At the center of their narration is the individual
realist novels are a narrative of exemplary learning and representative initiation of being initiated into society, learning what society is all about (Bildungsroman)
focus on ordinary people, not overly heroic/larger than life, representatives whom readers can relate to, reject flat characters, they have realistic and complicated characters with diverse perspectives and emotion
narration is interested in being more immediate, showing more towards the perspective of particular characters seems to be more authentic and realistic to them
readers are asked to draw their own conclusions and make their own judgements
language
readers can relate to and recognize as part of their own reality
slang/dialects
purpose
The faithful, the objective, the true representation of what is observed, circumstances in external reality
not interested in immediate mimesis, but interested in verisimilitude =/= "real" / a reality effect
Something that could have happened, not necessarily happened in reality
being plausible and close to reality and producing the reality effect, it is realistic
representatives
William Dean Howwells
Henry James
Mark Twain(1835-1910)
born in Missouri
frontier experience
boyhood adventures
childhood full of adventures
traveled widely in Europe and the Middle East
humor of his early work which is often emphasized
changed from humorist and local colorist to a pessimist
Mostly prose writing
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
Ernest Hemingway: "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain, called Huckleberry Finn"
about an orphant, poor, unschooled,wild, uncivilized, young boy
He lives under the motherly protection and his sister who try to civilize him
Huck runs away
1 more item...
published after the civil war but discusses the time before the civil war
the journey creates the time and space for the experience of a human relationship between Huck and Jim and for their observation of American realities
Allow to portray a panorama of society
for ex. the two witnessing murder, attempted lynching, crimes, cultural scenes and the frontier and separations and reunifications
Follows several literary conventions, ranging from adventure literature to travel book to slave narrative to social satire to color story, etc.. .
Significant:
Huck as a protagonist and also as the narrator
Huck's (adolescent) perspective is limited and thus not yet corrupted by the paradigms by the formulas of grown ups and by their civilization
his perspective more open, more frank, more innocent and honestly critical
The reader is left with his narrator and thus without moral guidance in a traditional sense of an omniscient narrator for ex.
Three major facets of Huck Finn have been stressed in interpretations
1st his rejection of civilization
thematic core of the novel/American core of the novel
Huck seen as a prototypical American who does not want to grow up and wants to invade civilization .> life of freedom, individualism, adventure and regeneration
2nd Hucks Friendship with Jim seen as a prototypical and symbolic humanization of a slave
they create a friendship that creates a counter world of society
retrospective critique of slavery
a call to overcome the post-civil-war racial segregation and thus can be taken as this call to also in the contemporary times fight discrimination and segregation
pre & post civil war
3rd Huck has been interpreted of the observer of American realities
He observes and exposes the corruption and hypocrisy of American society
Huck recognizes the fraud and immorality that determine social interaction
How successful is the presentation of Jim in the Novel?
controverse and ambiguous
Victim and as somebody having agency.
He is an individual but there is also an stereotypical, racist depiction
reception
Individual and national regeneration
has often been reduced to an example of juvenile adventure literature
it is also a critique of American History and Society
has often been repressed and censored as morally dangerous also and even taken out of public libraries, also in more recent times.
has stured one of the most controversial studies in scholarship
Shelly Fisher Fishkin (1993) Was Huck Black? Mark Twain in African American Voices.
Raises the Question whether Huck Finn wasn't really modelled by a real black Child named Jimmy, known by Twain in his youth.
seen as quintessential American novel
Edith Wharton
Kate Chopin