American Realism: 1850-1900

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American Realism1850-1900
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The Most Important Event
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The Most Important Person
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Responses to the War

• Idealism
• Emerson
• Whitman Future years will never know the
  seething hell and the background of countless
  minor scenes and interiors and it is best they
  should notthe real war will never get in the
  books.

• Disillusionment
• Melville
• O, the rising of the People
• Came with the springing of the grass,
• They rebounded from dejection
• After Easter came to pass.
• And the young were all elation
• Hearing Sumters cannon roar
• But the Elders with foreboding,
• Mourned the days forever oer,
• And recalled the forest proverb,
• The Iroquois old saw
• Grief to every graybeard
• When Young Indians lead the war.

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Walt Whitmans Stupid Prediction?

• A great literature will arise out of the era of
  those four years
• --Walt Whitman
• Almost none of the great American writers saw
  battle. Almost no one who fought wrote about it.
• The great book of the Civil War was written by a
  man who was not born until six years after the
  war had ended Stephen Crane

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The Rise of Realism

• Realism defined Literature written from
  approximately 1850-1900 that aims at a very
  minute fidelity to the common course of ordinary
  life.
• Subjects are taken from
• Slums
• Factories
• Corruption of politics
• Even prostitution

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Realism as a Reaction to Romanticism

• No more
• Romantic adventures
• Courageous acts and daring escapes
• Idealized escapes into nature
• Imaginative descriptions of the evil of the human
  soul

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Naturalism

• A subset of realism that
• Claims to portray life exactly as it is, with
  detachment and objectivity
• Relies heavily on the growing scientific
  disciplines of psychology and sociology
• Attempts to dissect human behavior with
  objectivity like a scientist dissecting a frog
• Looks at human life as a grim human behavior
• Is super-influenced by Charles Darwin
• Believes that human behavior is determined by
  heredity and environment
• Sees Human beings as subject to natural forces
  beyond their control

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Review

• How does the Civil War fit in with Realism?

• How does Darwin relate to Realism?