The Age of Realism (1880
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Transcript The Age of Realism (1880
Regionalism and Local Color
Realism and Naturalism
THE AGE OF REALISM (1880-1914)
HENRY JAMES ONCE WROTE…
“What is character but the determination of
incident? What is incident but the illustration
of character?”
POLITICAL AND SOCIAL EVENTS
1883: The Brooklyn Bridge opens
1885: The first skyscraper opens in Chicago
1893: The World’s Columbian Exposition
showcases American technology and industry
1898: Spanish-American War
1903: Wright Brothers make first airplane flight
1913: Henry Ford announces the assembly line
WORLD EVENTS
1881: Pasteur develops vaccine for rabies
1885: Benz produces first gasoline-operated car
1895: X-Rays discovered
1899: Aspirin is patented
1905: Einstein formulates theory of relativity
1910: Sigmund Freud publishes Psychoanalytic
book
1912: The Titanic sinks
1914: World War I begins
EFFECTS OF EXPANSION
Population grows by 50%
Endless supply of workers and resources
Westward expansion
Land,
farms, ranches, mines
Frontier declared “closed” by consensus (1890)
Where to expand now?
Building
cities, forging industrial empires, finding
distant international outposts to plant the US flag
NATIVE AMERICANS
US Army soldiers kill more than 200 Sioux men,
women, and children
Native Americans confined on reservations
LITERATURE
Romanticism wilted after Civil War
“Realists” were a reaction to this disillusionment
Focused on everyday life
Ordinary human behavior
“Local Color” writing reflected true-to-life…
Customs
Speech
Character
…of people in different regions of the country.
PROSPERITY
New inventions
Airplanes,
skyscrapers, motion pictures
Corporations grew into monopolies
Controlled
wages
Fixed prices
Lack of competition
Concentrated power in the hands of the few
Gap between rich and poor became a canyon
REALISTIC NOVELS
Relied on emerging sciences of biology,
psychology, and sociology
Showed an interest in human motivation/
psychology– interior issues
Realistic settings presenting adversity
Battlefields,
lifeboats, slums, cityscapes
Realistic Authors
Henry
James
Stephen Crane
Kate Chopin
REFORMS
Overcrowded cities, social inequalities led to
reform
Roosevelt became a “trustbuster” (monopoly
regulator)
Labor movement
Hours, working conditions, working conditions
Niagara movement (W.E.B. DuBois)
Female suffrage (Susan B. Anthony)
Landscape and wildlife protection (John Muir)
NATURALIST WRITING
Relied on scientific understandings to dissect
human behavior
Inspired
by Darwin and Freud’s recent theories
Focus on environmental forces that determine
human fate
Jack
London (Call of the Wild)
Theodore Dreiser (Sister Carrie)
REGIONALISM AND LOCAL COLOR
Credit: Artist, Gary R. Lucy.
CHARACTERISTICS OF REGIONALISM
Desire to record, celebrate, and mythologize
the many different and unique geographical
regions
Attention to recording accurately the speech,
mannerisms, behavior, and beliefs of people in
specific locales
Local color writing “painted” the local scenes
and tends toward humorous or sentimental
tones
MAJOR REGIONALIST AUTHORS
Mark Twain
Mississippi
River
Small river towns
Bret Harte
Gold-mining
camps of the West
Western pulp fiction
Gamblers, gunfighters, gold
MARK TWAIN: AUTHOR FOCUS
You will understand…
tall tales
vernacular
writer’s purpose
comic devices