Slide 1

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 2

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 3

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 4

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 5

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 6

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 7

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 8

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 9

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 10

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 11

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 12

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 13

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 14

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 15

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 16

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 17

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 18

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 19

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 20

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 21

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 22

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 23

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 24

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 25

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 26

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 27

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 28

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 29

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 30

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 31

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 32

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 33

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 34

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 35

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 36

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 37

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 38

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 39

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 40

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 41

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 42

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 43

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 44

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 45

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 46

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 47

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 48

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 49

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 50

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 51

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 52

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 53

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 54

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 55

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 56

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 57

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 58

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 59

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 60

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 61

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 62

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 63

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 64

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 65

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 66

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 67

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 68

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 69

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 70

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 71

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 72

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 73

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 74

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 75

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 76

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 77

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 78

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 79

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 80

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 81

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 82

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 83

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 84

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries


Slide 85

Literary Romanticism
What is it?

Early Literary Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•

Characterized by complicated plots
Well-developed characters
unusual characters
Exotic settings
Traditional morality (i.e., ‘Biblical’)
Sin Nature may be recognized

Complicated Plots . . .
• Multi-layered plots (as in UTC or Huck Finn)
o Sub-plots
o Plots woven together to make a whole
o Plots based on traditional ideas of right and wrong
o Logic and reason
o Plots serve a purpose
o To entertain, or
o To educate (or practice Values Clarification)

Well-developed Characters
• Characters are heroes worthy of imitation
• Characters teach right and wrong by example
and provide a moral compass
o Good guys teach what to do
o Bad guys teach what NOT to do

• Idealistic: larger than life

Unusual Characters
• A Worthy Christian slave in bitter
circumstances
• A dying Christian girl
• A worst-case slave girl raised like an animal
• A northern woman in a home run by slaves
• A worst-ever father figure

Stereotypes provide social lessons
•
•
•
•

The Southern belle lifestyle is not healthy
Slavery ruins families
Slavery ruins slave holders
You cannot be ‘indifferent’ to the evil of
slavery
• You must be willing to take action

Exotic Settings
•
•
•
•
•
•

A slave-run farm
An anti-typical New Orleans estate
A Louisiana cotton plantation
Life on a raft on the Mississippi River
Castles, medieval times, tournaments
Distant past, historic past, futuristic

Traditional Morality
• Heroes worthy of imitation provide a moral
compass
o Uncle Tom
o Evangeline St. Clare
o Miss Ophelia
o Young George Shelby
o Jim

As Romanticism progresses
The influence of Christianity becomes more and
more vague until it is nearly left behind as
antiquated, outdated, & old-fashioned

Romanticism
The exaltation of Nature

Romanticism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

Follow the heart, emotions, and instinct
Reject moral absolutes
Place blame on society
Concentrate on Nature over civilization
Relative truth
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe
Elevation of Noble Savage image

Sensibility
Follow your heart-it will never lie: emphasis on
the individual, center of life/experience (in
contrast with Prov. 3:5, Jer. 17:5, 9; 18:12,
Acts 15:9.
Self analysis; it’s all about me: Voltaire,
Rousseau, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman.
What is unique in a person is important.

Revolution of all Propriety
In 150 years . . .

The rejection of religious absolutes in 1859
eventually leads to the absurd in 2009

Innocence Replaces Wisdom
Society and civilization are to blame!
We begin to see ‘ethical dilemmas’ where
‘wrong’ is the ‘right thing’ to do
We call this ‘situational ethics’
We see extraordinary characters (usually
neurotic) in unusual circumstances

The Green Concept
The Exaltation of Nature

Literature will exalt the wild and natural, and
scorn the artificial

Imagination Replaces Reality
Literature will focus on the importance
of intuition and relative truth

Dark Romanticism
Occult fantasies replace clockwork universe:
Dracula, Frankenstein, Captain Jack Sparrow, and
Peter Pan-type characters emerge

The Noble Savage
Civilization is to blame for man’s problems (e.g.,
Tarzan is more ethically-minded than any
civilized man he meets).
The Nobel Savage is resultant from the rejection
of Original Sin; Tarzan and Huck Finn are
unspoiled by human society; Society is to
blame for behaviors, not a Sin Nature.

Spiritual Dilemma of the Noble Savage
A secular version of a spiritual dilemma sets the
romantic individual in a tension between
individual freedom and social constraint.
Without the Bible (e.g., Heb. 4:12) to validate
moral absolutes, there is no solution to
spiritual dilemmas (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).

Hebrews 4:12
“For the word of God is living and active.
Sharper than any double-edged sword, it
penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit,
joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and
attitudes of the heart”

2 Timothy 3:16, 17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for
teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in
righteousness, so that the man of God may be
thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Literary Heroes
Literary heroes are no longer moral paragons
subject to a universal standard
The anti-hero develops in literature to explore
the individual experience and explore
traditional concepts of morality

What Happened?
Prior to 1859 and the publication of Darwin’s
Origin of the Species, the humanistic ideals of
the Enlightenment/Deism/Age of Reason were
not enough to jettison God from the universe.
Everything changed in 1859

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The Origin of Species (1859)
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION
‘Enlightened’ thinkers rejected God completely
from their ‘clockwork universe’ model and
their ‘blind watchmaker’ model.
The clock needs a designer-creator
The watchmaker implies intelligence

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin’s theory needs no Creator
Darwin’s theory needs no Savior
Darwin’s theory needs no supernatural element

A New Worldview Paradigm
Everything will be explained in terms of natural
processes
This is what makes Darwin more important than
Newton or Einstein to the secular world

A New Worldview Paradigm
Darwin negates the need for God
Religion becomes a ‘crutch’ for the
unenlightened

One hundred
years later in
1959
The propaganda movie,
Inherit the Wind, hit the
movie screen

Based loosely on the 1925 Scopes
Monkey Trial
Inherit the Wind helped to
elevate Darwin’s theory
to monumental stature
by depicting religion as
the enemy of open
scientific inquiry

The next 100 years . . .
Darwin’s theory of natural selection has gained
favor in the growing secular world
It is now ‘the fact’ to be accepted rather than a
scientific theory subject to critical analysis

Scientific or Social?
Darwin's own involvement with these ideas is
relatively murky. Some of his writings suggest
strong sympathies for the social application of
his theories:

From Origin of the Species:
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated; and those that survive
commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health.
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our
utmost to check the progress of elimination;
we build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed, and the sick;

Continued
we institute poor-laws....Thus, the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that
this must be highly injurious to the race of
man.”

Hmmmm . . .
It is worth noting here that Darwin's argument is
not scientific, but social, and that he makes
some rather grand assumptions about a
breeder's ability to select advantageous traits.
...

In the final estimation, social Darwinism appears
to be a reaction to what was perhaps the most
unsettling revelation of Darwinism: the
rescinding of humanity's providential purpose.
...

Humans no longer appeared to exist for any
particular reason. The earth didn't need us,
and had probably existed for a long time
without us. . . .

Social Darwinism used this theological void to
challenge notions of social charity, but also to
recast humanity's purpose as willful selfperfection.

Glossary entry: ‘Social Darwinism’

The Strength of Darwinism is its
Biggest Weakness
The Fossil Record and the lack of transitional
forms
The Forgeries include: Java man, Nebraska man,
Piltdown man, Peking man, and Lucy, not to
mention the phenomenon of China's thriving
fake fossil business reported in the February
2003 issue of Discover.

Java Man – the famous thigh bone
Found on the Indonesian
island of Java in 1892:
• A thigh bone
• A large skull cap
• Three teeth
The pieces were found
one year and 50 feet
apart

The pieces were called the
‘missing link’ and Java
Man eventually became
widely accepted as
such, in spite of the fact
that a leading authority
had identified two of
the teeth as those of an
orangutan, and the
other as human.

What does Evolution have to do with
Literature?
We see the evolutionary worldview reflected in
all secular literature shortly after Origin of the
Species is published
We also see the evolutionary worldview
reflected in much theological literature as the
Bible is analyzed by ‘new’ science!

What should we expect to see in
literature?

Shifting Worldviews

REALISM 1865-1910

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

REALISM
Like all literary movements, the lines between
early romanticism and Realism are impossible
to draw.
Realism merges into Romantic literature to serve
a need (educate the reading audience)

Realism: The Narrator
An Objective, Neutral Narrator
The narrator does not judge the morals in the
story as right or wrong
He just tells the facts of the story as they occur

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism suggested that in a society of
competitors, those who "won" prevailed
through superior breeding.
Those who failed—poor, African-American, Irish,
etc.—did so because of inferior breeding.

Realism: Expect Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists tended to focus their
arguments on the poor and infirm, where the
struggle of the species (and its supposedly less
fit examples) was most evident
Expect to see stories about the poor and the
struggling

Realism: Social Awareness
Expect to read critical appraisals of society and
its institutions
Society will be questioned
Institutions will be questioned

Realism: the language

Expect coarse, frank, brutal descriptions

Realism: Literary Characters
Expect a focus on literary character rather than
plot (romanticism focused on plots and
settings, besides characters)
Loss of the literary hero: no bigger-than-life
pattern to imitate

Realism does NOT like . . .
Sentimental Fiction
Idealistic Fiction
because . . .

REALISM

Life is short: then you die

Realism
Rejection of moral absolutes and traditional
Christianity
Expect an exploration of Christian ethics and
values

Realism

Realism may trivialize or profane things you hold
to be sacred:
Marriage, family, children’s roles, clergy, church

Realism and Christianity
Some Christian writers adopt realism to effect
changes in morality or society:
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Frank Peretti: This Present Darkness
Randy Alcorn: Deadline

Shifting Worldviews

NATURALISM

NATURALISM
What should we expect to see in literature?

REALSIM 1865-1910
NATURALISM 1880-1914
NB: they overlap

MODERNISM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE1914-1945

NATURALISM
I. WORLD WAR I (1914-18), the “war to end
all wars” –
Post-War cultural upheaval brings a decline in
American worldview reflected in literature

The USA entered the war after three years,
declaring war on Germany April 6, 1917. A
truce was signed November 11th, 1918. The
US entered social upheaval.

a. Increased mobility of Americans: - the
automobile
a. Modern Communications: radio (1922) and
television (1930 about 200 sets worldwide, by
1948 1 million)
a. Silent Movies (1913) talkies by late 20s, color by
1960

d. “The lost generation” despite the gay look, the
prosperity, the youth were called the lost
generation. Named this by Gertrude Stein.
No stable, traditional values, individual loss of identity,
no supportive family life, no familiar small town
community, with life revolving around planting and
harvesting activities. All were undermined by WWI
and its aftermath

II. THE ROARING TWENTIES,
or the Jazz Age

a. Irresponsibility
i. Political
US had just fought for democracy and now
ignored the world, after merging as the
strongest world power. We pursued a policy
of political isolationism. We were anxious to
forget the war.
Entering WWI we had recognized that America’s
interests do extend beyond our own borders,
but we now introverted our focus.

ii. Moral
Shocked and permanently changed, Americans
returned to their homeland but could never
regain their innocence.
Western youths were rebelling, angry and
disillusioned. In a search for personal freedom
and new interests, we threw aside the traditional
values of the previous generations. The most
popular dance was the Charleston - the wildest
dance - a type of moral abandonment. The dance
symbolized the behavior of many people. We
began pursuing pleasure and wealth.

I. T.S.Eliot’s long poem, The Waste
Land (1922)
Western civilization is symbolized by a
bleak desert in desperate need of
rain (spiritual renewal).

iii. Leisure has been declared the basis
of culture.
Leisure provided the freedom for men like
Jefferson and Franklin (and later, Einstein) to
develop invention, read, write, and further
theological understanding.

iv. Mindless Entertainment stifles
creativity and precludes
contemplation of God and
theological issues
Most people went to the movies once a week!

a. The Flapper: American women,
in particular, felt ‘liberated’
Many had left farms and villages for homefront
duty in American cities during World War I,
and had become resolutely modern. They cut
their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short
"flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to
vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the
Constitution, passed in 1920.

b. The Bootlegger:
Illegal alcohol during Prohibition

c. Lawlessness:
Gang leaders like Al Capone ruled cities,
making millions from liquor, extortion, and
prostitution.
You’ve seen corrupt police and corrupt
politicians in old movies depicting this era.

d. Church Attendance:
fell to the lowest level in our country’s
history!

v. Economic Personal Wealth: The
post-war Big Boom
The Wall Street speculation and lifestyle
depicted in Melville’s “Bartleby.” In 1914 our
nation had 4,500 millionaires. By 1926 we
had 11,000. Land sales boomed in warmer
climates, like California and Florida. Many
people purchased the ultimate status symbol
-- an automobile.

The typical urban American home
glowed with electric lights and
boasted a radio that connected the
house with the outside world, and
perhaps a telephone, a camera, a
typewriter, or a sewing machine, all
modern and American made.

1. "The chief business of the
American people is business,"
President Calvin Coolidge
proclaimed in 1925, and most
agreed.

III. THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929 - the bottom
dropped out of the stock market.
Within 3 years, even the most stable stocks had
plummeted. General Motors dropped from
$91 per share to $7. Sears Roebuck dropped
from $181 to $9.

a. Bank Failures: Business failures

i.

Economic disaster: Drastic rates of
unemployment.
Millions lost both jobs and their savings.
Yes, your great-grandparents saved.

ii. New Deal Programs set up by
President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (1933-45):
My mom was born in 1933. Our confidence
was replaced by unrest. The Depression was
worldwide, but we felt it more because our
previous decade had been so prosperous.

By 1935 1 out of every 6 or 7 Americans was on
government relief. The average annual family
income for a third of the nation was less than
$500. The upper third of Americans lived on
$2,000 annually.

A Plymouth cost just over $500, a loaf of
bread $.10, and a pound of apples was
$.05. Prosperity did not return until the
1940s. Midwestern droughts turned the
"breadbasket" of America into a dust
bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for
California in search of jobs, as vividly
described in:

l. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all
Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens,
shanty towns, and armies of hobos -unemployed men illegally riding freight trains
-- became part of national life.

Many saw the Depression as a punishment for
sins of excessive materialism and loose living.
This novel is the stark account of the Judd
family in the poverty of the Oklahoma dust
bowl and their migration to California during
the Depression of the 1930s.

IV. WORLD WAR II
a. America blinded by economic worries