Chapter Two American Literature of the Realism

Introduction of background The features of American literature of realism American Naturalism Influential writers Some terms ( realism, local colourism, The Gild

ed Age ) Some exercises.

The important points: 1. american realism’s features. 2. Mark Twain’s works characteristics. 3. Emily Dickinson’s artistic features. 4. The differences among the three greatest

American Realism novelists (Mark Twain, Henry James and Howells).

5. American naturalism.

IntroductionBy the middle of 19th century, the romantic lit

erature dominated America’s literary circles and the realist literature was just in the embryonic 开始 stage. At the time the antislavery struggle developed vigorously and the Civil War was about to break out; it was in such a revolutionary situation that the American realist literature came into being.

After the Civil War, the great changes of the factual society brought changes to American literature, that is , the romantic literature declined gradually and the realist literature began to rise and develop and a group of outstanding realist writers appeared.

Features of this period

(1) Native trends in the realistic portrayal 描写 of the landscape and social surfaces.

(2) Perfect the dialect style.

(3) Concern about "local colourism", a unique variation of American literary realism.

The features of American Realism Three trends mark the literature of the period: r

egionalism or local colourism, realism, and naturalism.

Three movements became increasingly important in American fiction after the Civil War. As the country expanded in area and population, regional differences became more apparent and of greatest interest, especially to people in the established cultural centers of the east.

In reaction to romanticism, it emphasized the everyday and through detailed description re-created specific locations, incidents and social classes.

Some influential writers

H. B. Stowe Three realist novelists: [ Mark Twain, Henry

James(1843-1916) and William D Howells] Emily Dickinson Theodore Dresiser(1871-1945) O. Henry

H. B. Stowe

She is best known for the antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was first published serially and then in book form in 1851 and 1852.

It was an immediate success, selling the unprecedented number of over 300,000 copies in its first year, and since that time it has been frequently translated and often dramatized, originally as a powerful antislavery document.

Mark Twain Samuel L. Clemens, his

pseudonym is Mark Twain. The father of American

literature, according to the American writer Hemingway’s saying: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the best book in all of the books, it is the origin of American works.

Primary Works The Innocents Abroad 《傻瓜出国记》 1869;

Roughing It, 1872; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 《汤姆 · 索

耶历险记》 1876; A Tramp Abroad, 《流浪汉出国记》 1880; The Prince and the Pauper 《王子与贫儿》 ,

1882; Life on the Mississippi, 1883; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 《哈克

贝利 · 费恩历险记》 , 1885;

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur‘s Court《亚瑟王宫廷中的美国佬》 , 1889;

The Tragedy of Pudd‘nhead Wilson and the Comedy of Those Extraordinary Twins 《傻瓜威尔逊》 , 1894;

Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, 1896; Following the Equator , 1897; Autobiography,

1924; The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts, 1969; What is Man? and Other Philosophical Writing

s, 1973.

His works’ characteristics: a. He is known as a local colorist, who preferre

d to present social life through portraits of the local characters of his regions.

b. His use of vernacular 本国的 . His words are colloquial, concrete and direct in effect, and his sentences structures are simple, even ungrammatical.

c. He is humorous too. It is fun to read Twain to begin with, for most of his works tend to be funny.

Henry James(1843-1916) He was the first American writer to conceive his career in internati

onal terms. The son of the theological 神学 writer Henry James Main works: Daisy Miller The Europeans The Portrait of A Lady Bostonians The Private Life The Death of a Lion The Middle Years The Turn of the Screw What Maisie Knows The Wings of the Dove The Ambassadors The Golden Bowl

His works characteristicsa. James’s fame generally rests upon his novels

and stories with the international theme.

These novels are always set against a larger international background, usually between Europe and American, and centered on the confrontation 面队 , 对质 of the two different cultures with two different groups of people representing two different value system.

b. His literary criticism is an indispensable part of his contribution to literature. it is both concerned with form and devoted to human values.

c. His realism is characterized by his psychological approach to his subject matter. His fictional world is concerned more with the inner life of human beings than with overt human actions.

d. His literary techniques innovated to cater for this psychological emphasis is his narrative “point of view”.

e. He is not only one of the most important realists of the period before the First World War, but also the most expert stylist of his time.

William D Howells

The champion of the new

School, felt that he must

write what he observed

and knew. The main

theme of his reveals

His literary credo 信条 .

The literal opinion of Howells

1. to describe the daily life of what you see and know.

2. the art is for morality. 3. to express the life’s bright side.

The Differences among William D. Howells, Mark Twain and Henry James

Though the three prominent writers wrote more or less at the same time, they differed in their understanding of the “truth.”

While Mark Twain and Howells seemed to have paid more attention to the “life ” of the Americans, they both shared the same concern in presenting the truth of the American society, they had each of them different emphasis.

Howells focused his discussion on the rising middle-class and the way they lived, while Twain preferred to have his own region and people at the forefront of his stories this particular concern about the local character of a region came about as “local colourism. ”

Henry James had apparently laid a greater emphasis on the “inner world” of man. In addition Henry James thinks that writers should use language to probe the deepest reaches of the psychological and moral nature of human beings. He is a realist of the inner life.

Emily Dickinson--Pioneer of Imagism Poetry Born: 10 December 1830

Birthplace: Amherst, Massachusetts

Died: 15 May 1886 Best Known As:

The poet called "The Belle of Amherst,

Massachusetts”

Emily Dickinson(1830-1886) Main works: I heard a Fly buzz-when I died (her

masterpiece) If you were coming in the Fall There came a Day at Summer’s full I cannot live with you I’m wife-I’ve finished that- I’m ceded-I’ve stopped being theirs

Emily Dickinson

Subject matters: religion, death, immortality, love, nature and society

Her poems are usually short, hardly more than 20 lines and many of them are centered on the single image or symbol or subject matter.

Her tone: personal and familiar. Rhetorical devices: personification, metaphor

and symbol.

Emily’s works features and her idea

Works features: (1) She uses a particular rhyme pattern, uses dashes

and capital letters as a means of emphasis(2)Simplicity and plainness(3)Focus on a single image or symbol(4)Poems are personal and meditative(5)Personification.

Emily’s idea: Skeptical about the relationship between man and

nature, concerns religion, death, immortality, love, nature.

Style: her poems have no titles, so are always quoted by their first lines.

In her poetry, there is a particular stress patters: dashes are used as a musical device to create cadence owe punctuation and capital letters as a means of emphasis.

The form of poetry: is more or less like that of hymns (/i/) in community churches familiar communal and sometimes irregular. Sometimes her irregular and inverted structures confused the readers.

Her expressions are famous for its brevity directness and plainness.

O. Henry O. Henry is the pen name of the American

author William Sidney Porter, whose short stories entertained millions of readers and influenced generations of writers In the united States and abroad.

His main works: 1898, Cabbages And Kings 1906, The Four Million 1908, the Voice of the City 1909, Roads of Destiny 1912 Rolling Stones

American NaturalismIt was influenced by Darwin‘s evolutionary theory:

1. They accept the more negative implications of it and use it to explain the behavior of those characters in literary works.

2. They inherited qualities, and habits confined by social forces are depicted.

3. Theme: human “bestiality 兽行 ", especially the sexual desire.

４ . Unpolished language

５ . Philosophically, the truth is always partially hidden from the eyes of the individual, or beyond his control.

６ . Material source from the lower ranks of society portray misery and poverty.

７ . Naturalism is evolved from realism. Author‘s tone in writing is less serious and sympathetic, more ironic and pessimistic.

Theodore Dreiser

1.works:Sister Carrie

2.Trilogy 三步曲 :The Financier; The Titan; The Stoic 　　 greatest work: An American Tragedy

3.idea:naturalist　　 (1)heredity and environment are the forces determining man‘s destiny, under what life was ironic, even tragic.　　 (2)human beings‘ life was trapped into ‘a welter of inscrutable forces’　　 (3)Darwin‘s idea of "survival of the fittest" is embodied as "kill or to be killed" in Dreiser‘s works. 　

(4)He explains the insignificance of life and attack the conventional moral standards.

(5)materialism is the core. Man has a meaningless, endless search for satisfaction of his desires, desires for money.

(6)Sex is another human desire. Sexual beauty symbolizes the social status.

Some terms Realism refers to the literary tendency

appeared after the American Civil War. The harsh realities of life as well as the disillusion of heroism resulting from the dark memories of the Civil War had set the nation against the romance.

The Americans began to be tired of the sentimental feelings of Romanticism. A new generation of writers, dissatisfied with the Romantic ideas in the older generation, came up with a new inspiration.

Instead of thinking about the mysteries of life and death and heroic individualism, people’s attention was now directed to the interesting features of everyday existence, to what was brutal or sordid, and to the open portray of class struggle. This literary interest in the so-called reality of life started a new period in the American literary writings known as the Age or realism.

Local colourism is a unique variation of American literary realism. It refers to the particular concern about the local character of region. The local colorists’ writings are concerned with the life of a small well-defined region or province. The characteristic setting is the isolated small town. Local colorists were consciously nostalgic historians of a vanishing way of life, recorders of a present that faded before their eyes. They dedicated themselves to minutely accurate descriptions of the life of their regions.

Summary on the chapter

1. The time of this period. 2. Three features of the realism. 3. Three greatest realist novelists and their

differences. 4. Some other influential writers.

Analysis on works

look at the pictures, then answer the questions briefly.

Who are the novels’ writers? What are the Writers’ style?

Read the following poem, try to analyze whose poem it may belong to, tell the features

of the poet, analyze the poem’s form and structure.

I’m Nobody! I’m nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too? Then there’s a pair of us– don’t tell! They’d banish us. You know!

How dreary to be somebody! How public, like a frog To tell your name the livelong day To an admiring bog!

Form

The two stanzas of "I'm Nobody!" are highly typical for Dickinson, constituted of loose iambic trimeter occasionally including a fourth stress ("To tell your name--the livelong June--"). They follow an ABCB rhyme scheme (though in the first stanza, "you" and "too" rhyme, and "know" is only a half-rhyme, so the scheme could appear to be AABC), and she frequently uses rhythmic dashes to interrupt the flow.

Structure In the first stanza, Dickinson adopts the

persona of a child who is open, naive, and innocent.

The child-speaker welcomes the person who honestly identifies herself and who has a true identity. These qualities make that person "nobody" in society's eyes. To be "somebody" is to have status in society; society, the majority, excludes or rejects those who lack status or are "nobody"--"they'd banish us" for being nobody.

Some exercises

1. Which of the following is not right about Mark Twain‘s style of language

A. His sentence structures are long ， ungrammatical and difficult to read.

B. His words are colloquial ， concrete and direct in effect.

C. His humor is remarkable and characterized by puns ， straight-faced exaggeration ， repetition and anti-climax.

D. His style of language had exerted rather deep influence on the contemporary writers.

D

2. The impact of Darwin‘s evolutionary theory on the American thought and the influence of the 19th century French literature on the American men of letters gave rise to another school of realism: American ______.

A. Romanticism B. Transcendentalism

C. Realism D. Naturalism D

3. Which of the following is not written by Henry James

A. The Portrait of A Lady

B. The Wings of the Dove 　C. The BostoniansD. The Gilded Age 4. More than five hundred poems Dickinson w

rote are about nature ， in which her general Skepticism about the relationship between __ ____ is well-expressed.

　　 A. man and man B. men and women 　　 C. man and nature D. men and God3. D 4. C

5. Which of the following is right about Emily Dickinson‘s poems about nature 　　

A. In them ， she expressed her general affirmation about the relationship between man and nature.

B. Some of them showed her disbelief that there existed a mythical bond between man and nature.

C. Her poems reflected her feeling that nature is restorative to human beings.

D. Many of them showed her feeling of nature‘s inscrutability and indifference to the life and interests of human beings.

B

6. As a great innovator in American literature ，Walt Whitman wrote his poetry in an unconventional style which is now called free verse ， that is ___.

　　 A. lyrical poetry with chanting refrains 　　 B. poetry without a fixed beat or regular rh

yme scheme 　　 C. poetry without rhymes at the end of the

lines but with a fixed beat 　　 D. poetry in an irregular metric form and e

xpressing noble feelings

B

7. By the end of the 19th century ， the American realists sought to ______and therefore rejected the portrayal of idealized characters and events in their writings.

　　 A. describe the wide range of American experience

　　 B. show animal nature of human beings 　　 C. present the subtleties of human personal

ity 　　 D. both A and CD