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Article 1: Rise of Realism

The Rise of Realism. Boundless U.S. History Boundless, 20 Nov. 2016. Retrieved 21 Feb. 2017
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manifested itself
1.Questions to Highlight the answer Summarize the
Study information (5-10 words)

From the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, the

United States experienced enormous industrial, economic,
social, and cultural change. A continuous wave of European
immigration and the rising potential for international trade
brought increasing growth and prosperity to America. Through
artistic expression, American realism attempted to portray the
cultural exuberance of the figurative American landscape and
the life of ordinary Americans at home. Artists allowed the
emotional tenor, textures, and sounds of the city to influence
the style and composition of their creative projects. Musicians
noted the fast-paced nature of life in the early twentieth century
and responded with a fresh and new tempo. Authors told new
stories about boys and girls that real Americans could have
grown up with. Pulling away from fantasy and focusing on the
now, American realism presented a new gateway into
modernism.

Realist writers included Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain),

Stephen Crane, William Dean Howells, and Horatio Alger Jr.
Realist journalists, also called "muckrakers," included J acob
Riis and cartoonist Art Young. Realist musicians counted
James Allen Bland, C.A. White, and Scott Joplin in their
number.

Mark Twain

Samuel Clemens (18351910), better known by his pen name

of "Mark Twain," grew up in the Mississippi River f rontier town
of Hannibal, Missouri. Early nineteenth-century American
writing tended to be flowery, sentimental, or
ostentatiouspartially because authors were still trying to
prove that they could write as elegantly as the English. Twain's
style, however, was based on vigorous, realistic, colloquial
American speech, and gave American writers a new
appreciation of their national voice. Twain was the first major

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 author to come from the interior of the country, and he captured
its distinctive, humorous slang and tendency toward
iconoclasm. For Twain and other American writers of the late
nineteenth century, realism was not merely a literary technique:
It was a way of speaking truth and exploding worn-out
conventions. Twain is best known for his works Tom Sawyer
and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the latter of which
combined rich humor, a sturdy narrative, and social criticism.

Literary Naturalism

Naturalism was a literary movement taking place from roughly

1880 to 1940 that used detailed realism to suggest that social
conditions, heredity, and environment had an inevitable role in
shaping human character. Naturalism is the outgrowth of
literary realism, a prominent literary movement in
mid-nineteenth century France and elsewhere. Naturalistic
writers were influenced by Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.
They believed that heredity and social environment largely
determine one's character. Whereas realism seeks only to
describe subjects as they really are, naturalism also attempts
to determine the underlying forces (e.g., the environment or
heredity) influencing the actions of its subjects. Naturalistic
works often include uncouth or sordid subject matter; for
example, the works of mile Zola, the most renowned literary
naturalist, demonstrate a frankness about sexuality along with
a pervasive pessimism. Naturalistic works exposed life's dark,
harsh realities, including poverty, racism, violence, prejudice,
disease, corruption, p rostitution, and filth. As a result,
naturalistic writers frequently were criticized for focusing too
much on human vice and misery.

American realism attempted to portray the life of ordinary

Americans at home, presenting a new artistic perspective.

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Article 2: Chapter 5: Late Nineteenth Century - American Realism

Reuben, Paul P. "Chapter 5: Late Nineteenth Century - American Realism - A Brief Introduction." PAL:
Perspectives in American Literature- A Research and Reference Guide.

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1.Questions to Highlight the answer Summarize the
Study information (5-10 words)

The second half of the 19th c. saw America becoming increasingly

self-conscious at the very time regional writers began to write about its
various aspects. American wanted to know what their country looked like, and
how the varied races which made up their growing population lived and
talked. It was the age of the first mappings and surveyings of the West; it was
the age of the in which the rails of of the first transcontinental railroad had
bound East and West.
The East asked what kinds of people leading what kinds of life are
at the end of those bands of iron?
The Western regionalists answered: Men and women like
yourselves, but dressed differently, speaking differently, with different social
ways: fantastic deserts, mile deep canyons, mountains high enough to bear
snow the year round, forests with trees as wide as man can stretch and
wider, villages where the only woman was the town whore, camps where the
only currency was gold-dust.
Writers of the South told of swamps where the cypress grew out the
green-scummed water and the moss grew down into it, and of the cities
where the obsessive blood-consciousness of its inhabitants testified to the
mingling of the races.
Mid-western authors narrated the tales of the plains where a man
could be lost in the dust or ruined by hailstorm; of cities where where fortunes
were made or lost in a day's trading on the beef or grain exchanges.
The literary map of America, so long a small corner of light in the
east, with a glimmer on the southern coast, began to be totally illuminated.
Bret Harte and Mark Twain brought in California, Nevada, and
Missouri; Edward Eggleston the hills of Indiana; George W. Cable and
William Harben the Delta county and North Georgia; Mary Noailles Murfree
the mountains of Tennessee; Sarah O. Jewett and Mary E. Wilkins freeman
the back country of New England; Harold Frederick the upstate valleys of
New York; E. W. Howe the village life of Kansas; Hamlin Garland the towns
and plains of the Dakotas and Wisconsin; Henry Blake Fuller the cement cliffs
of Chicago; Henry Harland the tenements of Manhattan.
"At its most compelling, American local-color realism points towards an
imaginative sociology that is at once objective and visionary. The images it
yields up compose the fragments of a book of the people, an essential history

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 of their lives' common conditioning. Paradoxically, at this level of realization,
the particular local circumstances begin to appear incidental. The same
stories are told, in more or less detail, on all sides."
Principles Of Realism
1. Insistence upon and defense of "the experienced commonplace".
2. Character more important than plot.
3. Attack upon romanticism and romantic writers.
4. Emphasis upon morality often self-realized and upon an examination of
idealism.
5. Concept of realism as a realization of democracy.
Identifying Characteristics Of Realistic Writing
1. The philosophy of Realism is known as "descendental" or
non-transcendental. The purpose of writing is to instruct and to entertain.
Realists were pragmatic, relativistic, democratic, and experimental.
2. The subject matter of Realism is drawn from "our experience," - it treated
the common, the average, the non-extreme, the representative, the probable.
3. The morality of Realism is intrinsic, integral, relativistic - relations between
people and society are explored.
4. The style of Realism is the vehicle which carries realistic philosophy,
subject matter, and morality. Emphasis is placed upon scenic presentation,
de-emphasizing authorial comment and evaluation. There is an objection
towards the omniscient point of view.
Realistic Complexity And Multiplicity
Complexity refers to the interwoven, entangled density of experience;
multiplicity indicates the simultaneous existence of different levels of reality or
of many truths, equally "true" from some point of view.
Realistic Characterization
There is the belief among the Realists that humans control their
destinies; characters act on their environment rather than simply reacting to
it. Character is superior to circumstance.
The Use Of Symbolism And Imagery
The Realists generally reject the kind of symbolism suggested by Emerson
when he said "Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact." Their use
of symbolism is controlled and limited; they depend more on the use of
images.
Realistic Techniques
1. Settings thoroughly familiar to the writer
2. Plots emphasizing the norm of daily experience
3. Ordinary characters, studied in depth
4. Complete authorial objectivity
5. Responsible morality; a world truly reported

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Article 3: The Second Industrial Revolution

The Second Industrial Revolution. Boundless U.S. History Boundless, 20 Nov. 2016. Retrieved 21 Feb. 2017

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words)

Increased mechanization of industry and improvements to worker efficiency

increased the productivity of factories while undercutting the need for skilled labor.
Mechanical innovations such as batch and continuous processing began to become
much more prominent in factories. This mechanization made some factories an
assemblage of unskilled laborers performing simple and repetitive tasks under the
direction of skilled foremen and engineers. In some cases, the advancement of such
mechanization substituted for low-skilled workers altogether. Both the number of
unskilled and skilled workers increased, as their wage rates grew. Engineering colleges
were established to feed the enormous demand for expertise. Together with rapid
growth of small business, a new middle class was quickly growing, especially in
northern cities.
The period from 1870 to 1890 saw the greatest increase in economic growth in such a
short period as ever in previous history. Living standards improved significantly as the
prices of goods fell dramatically due to the increases in productivity. This caused
unemployment and great upheavals in commerce and industry, with many laborers
being displaced by machines and many factories, ships, and other forms of fixed capital
becoming obsolete in a very short time span. Crop failures no longer resulted in
starvation in areas connected to large markets through transport infrastructure. By
1870, the work done by steam engines exceeded that done by animal and human
power. Horses and mules remained important in agriculture until the development of
the internal combustion tractor near the end of the Second Industrial Revolution.
Improvements in steam efficiency, such as triple-expansion steam engines, allowed
ships to carry much more freight than coal, resulting in greatly increased volumes of
international trade.

The Second Industrial Revolution continued into the twentieth century with early factory
electrification and the production line, and ended at the start of the World War I.

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Article 4: The Realism in American Literature, 1860-1890.

Campbell, Donna M. "Realism in American Literature, 1860-1890." Literary Movements. Dept. of
English, Washington State University. 7 Sept. 2015. Web. 26 Feb. 2017.
Read each paragraph and go through the following 3 steps.
1.Questions to Highlight the answer Summarize the
Study information (5-10 words)

Definitions
Broadly defined as "the faithful representation of reality" or
"verisimilitude," realism is a literary technique practiced by many schools of
writing. Although strictly speaking, realism is a technique, it also denotes a
particular kind of subject matter, especially the representation of middle-class life.
A reaction against romanticism, an interest in scientific method, the systematizing
of the study of documentary history, and the influence of rational philosophy all
affected the rise of realism. According to William Harmon and Hugh Holman,
"Where romanticists transcend the immediate to find the ideal, and naturalists
plumb the actual or superficial to find the scientific laws that control its actions,
realists center their attention to a remarkable degree on the immediate, the here
and now, the specific action, and the verifiable consequence" (A Handbook to
Literature 428).
Many critics have suggested that there is no clear distinction between
realism and its related late nineteenth-century movement, naturalism. As Donald
Pizer notes in his introduction to The Cambridge Companion to American
Realism and Naturalism: Howells to London, the term "realism" is difficult to
define, in part because it is used differently in European contexts than in
American literature. Pizer suggests that "whatever was being produced in fiction
during the 1870s and 1880s that was new, interesting, and roughly similar in a
number of ways can be designated as realism, and that an equally new,
interesting, and roughly similar body of writing produced at the turn of the century
can be designated as naturalism" (5). Put rather too simplistically, one rough
distinction made by critics is that realism espousing a deterministic philosophy
and focusing on the lower classes is considered naturalism.
In American literature, the term "realism" encompasses the period of time
from the Civil War to the turn of the century during which William Dean Howells,
Rebecca Harding Davis, Henry James, Mark Twain, and others wrote fiction
devoted to accurate representation and an exploration of American lives in
various contexts. As the United States grew rapidly after the Civil War, the
increasing rates of democracy and literacy, the rapid growth in industrialism and
urbanization, an expanding population base due to immigration, and a relative
rise in middle-class affluence provided a fertile literary environment for readers
interested in understanding these rapid shifts in culture. In drawing attention to
this connection, Amy Kaplan has called realism a "strategy for imagining and
managing the threats of social change" (Social Construction of American Realism
ix).

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 Realism was a movement that encompassed the entire country, or at
least the Midwest and South, although many of the writers and critics associated
with realism (notably W. D. Howells) were based in New England. Among the
Midwestern writers considered realists would be Joseph Kirkland, E. W. Howe,
and Hamlin Garland; the Southern writer John W. DeForest's Miss Ravenal's
Conversion from Secession to Loyalty is often considered a realist novel, too.
Characteristics (from Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition)
1. Renders reality closely and in comprehensive detail. Selective
presentation of reality with an emphasis on verisimilitude, even at the
expense of a well-made plot
2. Character is more important than action and plot; complex ethical choices
are often the subject.
3. Characters appear in their real complexity of temperament and motive;
they are in explicable relation to nature, to each other, to their social
class, to their own past.
4. Class is important; the novel has traditionally served the interests and
aspirations of an insurgent middle class. (See Ian Watt, The Rise of the
Novel)
5. Events will usually be plausible. Realistic novels avoid the sensational,
dramatic elements of naturalistic novels and romances.
6. Diction is natural vernacular, not heightened or poetic; tone may be
comic, satiric, or matter-of-fact.
7. Objectivity in presentation becomes increasingly important: overt
authorial comments or intrusions diminish as the century progresses.
8. Interior or psychological realism a variant form.
9. In Black and White Strangers, Kenneth Warren suggests that a basic
difference between realism and sentimentalism is that in realism, "the
redemption of the individual lay within the social world," but in sentimental
fiction, "the redemption of the social world lay with the individual" (75-76).
The realism of James and Twain was critically acclaimed in twentieth
century; Howellsian realism fell into disfavor as part of early twentieth century
rebellion against the "genteel tradition."
Context and Controversy
In its own time, realism was the subject of controversy; debates over the
suitability of realism as a mode of representation led to a critical exchange known
as the realism war.
The realism of James and Twain was critically acclaimed in the
twentieth century. Howellsian realism fell into disfavor, however, as part of early
twentieth century rebellion against the "genteel tradition." For an account of these
and other issues, see the realism bibliography and essays by Pizer, Michael
Anesko, Richard Lehan, and Louis J. Budd, among others, in the Cambridge
Guide to Realism and Naturalism.

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