Realism in american
literature
Prepared by Levkivskyi Volodymyr
American Realism
Literary Realism
 Realism originated as a nineteenth-century artistic
movement that rebelled against the romantics.
 While the romantics felt that art should show the
ideal, realist artists and writers focused on truth,
rather than beauty.
 They depicted the everyday world as it existed
around them.
 The subjects and plots of realist works, however, are
anything but ideal, or romantic.
What are the causes of the people’s
sudden interest?
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 middleclass affluence provided a fertile literary
environment for readers interested in
understanding these rapid shifts in culture that
led to an increase of realism in literature.
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Why did people read realistic novels?
Realism started around the civil war because:
The rise of industrialization
Stories they could relate too (rather than
Romanized ones)
People of the middle class wanted to be able to
sympathize with the literature
Characteristics of American Realism
 Objective
 Free Will
 Sometimes Optimistic
 Everyday Settings
 Ordinary Events
 Common Man Characters
 There is frequent use of colloquial speech. Diction is
natural vernacular, not heightened or poetic; tone may
be comic, satiric, or matter-of-fact.
 Characters are of the middle and low classes.
Complex Characters in Realism
 Complex characters in literature add depth to a text.
 The personalities of complex characters are often
multifaceted and are not easily defined in
straightforward or simplistic terms.
 Authors often use complex characters to portray the
variations in human nature.
 Complex characters often have internal conflicts that
cause them to question their own ideas, beliefs,
attitudes, and morals
 Complex characters may also be described as round
characters.
Complex Characters in Realism
Complex characters in realist literature, like real
people, react to events in unpredictable ways.
Their behavior reveals multiple motives and
conflicting traits, and it evolves with time.
Realist characters are more believable because
of these qualities.
Unreliable Narrators in Realism
 When reading a story, audiences expect to be able to
trust the narrator and the events that the narrator
describes. .
 Sometimes, though, narrators have an unreliable or
untrustworthy perspective on the events in a story.
 This limitation creates an unreliable narrator, or a
narrator whose story cannot be believed.
 In that case, readers must judge for themselves which
parts of the narrative are true and which should be
called into doubt.
 The two main reasons that readers might doubt a
narrator's credibility are a lack of sophistication and a
lack of sanity.
Types of Unreliable Narrators
 In a story with an unsophisticated narrator, the firstperson account often comes from a child's point of
view.
 An example of an unsophisticated narrator comes from
the novel To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Told from
the point of view of a young girl, Scout, living in a small
town in the 1930s, the story focuses on racial tensions in
the community.
 The narrator does not understand why race is such a
contentious, or controversial, issue.
Types of Unreliable Narrators
 Narrators who display a lack of sanity are also
considered unreliable because readers cannot be sure
which events actually take place and which occur only
in the narrator's imagination.
 Recall the excerpt from Poe's "The Black Cat.” Is the
mark on the cat's chest actually growing, or is the
change happening only in the narrator’s mind?
 Readers, recognizing that the narrator has shown signs
of insanity, must decide for themselves if the action is
truly taking place.
Effects of an Unreliable Narrator
 Authors often use unreliable narrators to reveal truths
about human nature and society.
 For instance, in To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee's
portrayal of racism through the eyes of the young girl,
Scout, serves to show that the moral corruption of racism
is evident even to a child.
Humor in American Realism: Satire
 Works of satire are written in a humorous way to point
out a flaw in society or a particular person.
 American humor blossomed during the realist period, as
evidenced by writers such as Mark Twain and Charles
Farrar Browne.
 Many characteristics of their writing, including using
ordinary characters and writing in the vernacular, or
common language, were also characteristics of realist
writing as a whole.
 Twain wrote stories and novels satirizing racial relations,
various British customs, and class differences in the 1800s.
Humor in American Realism: Hyperbole
 One technique many humorists employ is hyperbole, a
rhetorical device that exaggerates facts and details. Writers
use hyperbole to emphasize a point or to add humor based
on the absurdity or irrationality of the idea being
exaggerated.
 Consider the previous example from Browne's “Interview with
President Lincoln.” Where does it contain hyperbole?
 I should move heving and arth—so to speak—until I got
orfice [office] . . .
 "Move heving and arth," or moving heaven and earth, is a
hyperbole meaning that the speaker will try anything to
accomplish his task.