Regionalism and Local Color
Realism and Naturalism
THE AGE OF REALISM (1880-1914)
HENRY JAMES ONCE WROTE…
“What is character but the determination of
incident? What is incident but the illustration
of character?”
POLITICAL AND SOCIAL EVENTS
1883: The Brooklyn Bridge opens
 1885: The first skyscraper opens in Chicago
 1893: The World’s Columbian Exposition
showcases American technology and industry
 1898: Spanish-American War
 1903: Wright Brothers make first airplane flight
 1913: Henry Ford announces the assembly line

WORLD EVENTS
1881: Pasteur develops vaccine for rabies
 1885: Benz produces first gasoline-operated car
 1895: X-Rays discovered
 1899: Aspirin is patented
 1905: Einstein formulates theory of relativity
 1910: Sigmund Freud publishes Psychoanalytic
book
 1912: The Titanic sinks
 1914: World War I begins

EFFECTS OF EXPANSION
Population grows by 50%
 Endless supply of workers and resources
 Westward expansion

 Land,
farms, ranches, mines
Frontier declared “closed” by consensus (1890)
 Where to expand now?

 Building
cities, forging industrial empires, finding
distant international outposts to plant the US flag
NATIVE AMERICANS
US Army soldiers kill more than 200 Sioux men,
women, and children
 Native Americans confined on reservations

LITERATURE
Romanticism wilted after Civil War
 “Realists” were a reaction to this disillusionment

Focused on everyday life
 Ordinary human behavior


“Local Color” writing reflected true-to-life…
Customs
 Speech
 Character
…of people in different regions of the country.

PROSPERITY

New inventions
 Airplanes,

skyscrapers, motion pictures
Corporations grew into monopolies
 Controlled
wages
 Fixed prices
 Lack of competition
Concentrated power in the hands of the few
 Gap between rich and poor became a canyon

REALISTIC NOVELS
Relied on emerging sciences of biology,
psychology, and sociology
 Showed an interest in human motivation/
psychology– interior issues
 Realistic settings presenting adversity

 Battlefields,

lifeboats, slums, cityscapes
Realistic Authors
 Henry
James
 Stephen Crane
 Kate Chopin
REFORMS
Overcrowded cities, social inequalities led to
reform
 Roosevelt became a “trustbuster” (monopoly
regulator)
 Labor movement


Hours, working conditions, working conditions
Niagara movement (W.E.B. DuBois)
 Female suffrage (Susan B. Anthony)
 Landscape and wildlife protection (John Muir)

NATURALIST WRITING

Relied on scientific understandings to dissect
human behavior
 Inspired

by Darwin and Freud’s recent theories
Focus on environmental forces that determine
human fate
 Jack
London (Call of the Wild)
 Theodore Dreiser (Sister Carrie)
REGIONALISM AND LOCAL COLOR
Credit: Artist, Gary R. Lucy.
CHARACTERISTICS OF REGIONALISM
Desire to record, celebrate, and mythologize
the many different and unique geographical
regions
 Attention to recording accurately the speech,
mannerisms, behavior, and beliefs of people in
specific locales
 Local color writing “painted” the local scenes
and tends toward humorous or sentimental
tones

MAJOR REGIONALIST AUTHORS

Mark Twain
 Mississippi
River
 Small river towns

Bret Harte
 Gold-mining
camps of the West
 Western pulp fiction
 Gamblers, gunfighters, gold
MARK TWAIN: AUTHOR FOCUS
You will understand…
tall tales
vernacular
writer’s purpose
comic devices