AMERICAN REALISM AND NATURALISM

REALISM
 Associated with the rise of novelists such as Mark
Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens), Henry James,
Rebecca Harding Davis and William Dean Howells
 “ Nothing more and nothing less than the truthful
treatment of material” W.D.Howells
 The influence of realism in American Literature was
strongest between the end of the Civil War in 1865 and
the mid 1890s
 Emphasis on average, middle-class characters,
everyday actions, use of colloquial language (Twain,
Huckleberry Finn) to accurately reflect regional
differences
FEATURES OF REALISM
• American literary realism is characterized by fidelity to an empirical reality,

multidimensional characters, emphasis on rationality rather than emotion

• 2 distinct strands: SOCIAL REALISM and PSYCHOLOGICAL REALISM

• The Naturalist Frank Norris rebelled against what he came to regard as the

confinements of the realism practiced by Howells and his generation –realism as

“the drama of a broken teacup”

• In the first half of the 20th century, realism and naturalism dominated some

distinct kinds of American fiction, while influencing others in more subtle manner.

FORMS OF REALISM FORMS OF

NATURALISM
Regionalism
War fiction Detective novels
Novels of manners Social-protest novels
NATURALISM (1895-1920)
 Strongly influenced by the French writer Emil
Zola and the 19th century emergence of
Darwinian science
 DETERMINISM – the concept that individuals
are controlled by impersonal internal/or
external forces, is the philosophical basis of
naturalism
 Documenting the extreme experiences of
characters existing on the margins of society
 The city is the favored setting
 Early examples of this intensely
pessimistic genre :
o Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the
Streets (1896)
o Frank Norris’s McTeague (1896)
o Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie
(1900)
JACK LONDON (1876-1916)
Born in San Francisco as the
illegitimate son of Flora Wellman, a
spiritualist and William H Chaney, a
traveling astrologer.
When his mother married John
London, a farmer, he took his
stepfather’s name
At sixteen he became a sailor and
went to Japan. Then he toured
America and Canada
By 1895 he started his self-
education
The works of Charles Darwin, Karl
Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche
imbued London with a vision of
society as a struggle in which the
fittest survived.
His works show that the true
 At 21 London followed the gold rush to
the Klondike; 2 years later he sold his
first story “To the Man on the trail”
 His first book, the collection The Son of
the Wolf: Tales of the Far North (1900)
 He was soon producing a flood of
novels and stories about the
individual’s quest for survival and
triumph over nature and society
• His classic novel,
has been translated
into more than 50
languages
• The book made
London’s career as a
best-selling author
and secured his place
in American literary
naturalism
• The story is about a
dog, Buck, who is
stolen from a
comfortable
California home to be
used as a sled dog in
Klondike

THE CALL OF THE WILD 1903

THE SEA WOLF 1904
One of London’s most
successful works is the short
adventure novel The Sea
Wolf, in which a wealthy
literary critic, Humphrey Van
Weyden has to contend with
the ruthless Wolf Larsen,
captain of the Ghost, a
sealing schooner. In his
conflict with Larsen, Van
Weyden builds himself up
physically and mentally,
returning to society a
 By 1905 London was the most famous
and most widely read author in
America
 Other notable works: White Fang,
Martin Eden, The Iron Heel, The Valley
of the Moon
 He died at age forty one, leaving a
large body of work, some 600
nonfiction pieces and short stories and
more than 50 books