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
Gilded 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.

Introduction
 By
the middle of 19th century, the romantic
literature 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:
regionalism 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
Writings, 1973.

His works’ characteristics:
 a. He is known as a local colorist, who preferred
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)

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He was the first American writer to conceive his career in
international 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 characteristics
a.
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 Naturalism
It 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.
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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 halfrhyme, so the scheme could appear to be AABC),
and she frequently uses rhythmic dashes to
interrupt the flow.
Structure
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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 Bostonians
D. The Gilded Age
4. More than five hundred poems Dickinson
wrote 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 God
 3.
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 ___.
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A. lyrical poetry with chanting refrains

B. poetry without a fixed beat or regular
rhyme scheme
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C. poetry without rhymes at the end of the
lines but with a fixed beat

D. poetry in an irregular metric form and
expressing noble feelings
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B
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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
personality
D. both A and C
D