American Literature: Civil War Period PDF

Module 3 The Development of American Literature from the Mid Nineteenth Century Unit 1 The American Civil War Literature 1.0 Introduction 2.0 Objectives 3.0 Main Content 3.1 General Overview 3.2 The American Civil War and Literary Development 3.3 The Prose of The American Civi...

Module 3 The Development of American Literature from the Mid Nineteenth Century Unit 1 The American Civil War Literature 1.0 Introduction 2.0 Objectives 3.0 Main Content 3.1 General Overview 3.2 The American Civil War and Literary Development 3.3 The Prose of The American Civil War 4.0 Conclusion 5.0 Summary 6.0 Tutor-Marked Assignments 7.0 References/ Further Reading 1.0 Introduction In this unit you will learn the defining developments in America‘s literature in the latter half of the nineteenth century. You will learn how the American civil war influenced fictional and non-fictional writings. You will explore the ways writers used their works to define the war. Importantly, you will encounter how the post- war reconstruction led to the emergence of a realist literary tradition in America. 2.0 Objectives At the end of this course, you should be able to i. Describe the influence of the Civil War on American literature ii. Highlight the popular genres of the period iii. Discuss the role writing played in the process of the civil war iv. Explore the impact of the post-war reconstruction on the emergence of a new literary tradition v. Identify works crucial in the civil war period. 3.0 Main Content 3.1 General Overview One of the defining historical developments in America during the latter part of the nineteenth century was the Civil War. The war took place between 1861 and 1865 between the North and South of the new country. The cause was the controversy over the enslavement of black people. The southern part of America formed a Confederacy and advocated for secession. They wanted the perpetuation of the enslavement of black people. Secessionist forces struck in April of 1861 shortly after the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln as President. It was the bloodiest conflict in American history. Over 360,000 American Union soldiers and 260,000 Confederates lost their lives on the battlefield or in military hospitals. Within a few decades after the war, however, the United States was assuming a new prosperity and developing into an industrial giant. Towns and cities sprang up from a massive industrial investment. An emergent ideology of success emerged. It celebrated the growth of American power and wealth. There was the spread of education and literacy. There was increasing technology which encouraged mass production. There was also access to market which was created by the railways. 3.2 The American Civil War and Literary Development America experienced significant change after the Civil War and toward the end of the nineteenth century. There was increasing urbanization and industrialization. There was the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad and the advent of new communication technologies such as the telegraph. America began to emerge as a more unified nation as it moved into the Industrial Age. Immigration from both Europe and Asia increased and provided cheap labor to rising urban centers during the last half of the nineteenth century. There was a subsequent rise in the middle class for the first time in America. The economic, social and political landscape began to change. Women became more vocal. They argued for the right to vote, to own property, and to earn their own living. African-Americans too began to rise to social and political prominence. They called for social equality and the right to vote as well. Workers in factories and businesses began to lobby for better working conditions. There was the organization of workers into trade unions. Free public schools opened throughout the nation. By the turn of the century, the majority of children in the United States attended school. The war produced considerable historical writing but no great fictional works. The Civil War was the largest crisis the nation had faced. It marked the fracturing of its unity. Yet none of the major writers of its generation participated actively. No great works emerged. What was produced was another kind of literary expression. Speeches, sermons, reportage, soldiers' songs and popular battle hymns and verses like "John Brown's Body," Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic" and Daniel Decatur Emmette's "Dixoe," which tallied the combatants in the conflict. Many of these pieces of war writing have been lost to posterity. Some of the best prose written about the war was produced immediately following upon the war in the form of realist prose fiction. These included novels such as John William De Forest's Miss Ravenel‘s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867), Albion Tourgee's A Fool‘s Errand (1879) and works by Thomas Nelson Page and George Washington Cable. The greatest novel about the immediacy of the battle-field did not appear for thirty years. It came from a writer born six years after the conflict ended and who said he reconstructed the event from the football-field. This was Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (1895). Within all these, American writers began to consider contemporary society and social issues for their writing material. They sought to create a new American literature that reflected American life and values they strove for a literary tradition which did not mimic British literary customs. They reacted against the Romantic style of writing which favored the ideal over the real representation of life in fiction. William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and Henry James wrote prolifically about the Realistic method, where writers created characters and plot based on average people experiencing the common concerns of everyday life, and they also produced their own literary masterpieces using this style. All writers in the Realistic mode shared a commitment to referential narrative. Their readers expected to meet characters that resembled ordinary people, often of the middle class. They depicted characters living in ordinary circumstances. Their characters experienced real-life struggles and, as in life, were unable to find resolution to their conflicts. Realists developed these characters by using ordinary speech that was commensurate to the character‘s social class. The character often drove the plot of the story. Characters in Realistic fiction were three- dimensional, and their inner lives were often revealed through an objective, omniscient narrator. Realists set their fiction in places that actually existed. They were interested in recent or contemporary life, not in history or legend. Setting in Realistic fiction was important but was not limited to a particular place or region. Realists believed in the accuracy of detail, and, for them, accuracy helped build the ―truth‖ conveyed in the work. The implied assumption for these writers is that ―reality‖ is verifiable. It is separate from human perception of it, and can be agreed upon collectively. Realistic writers believed that the function of the author is to show and not simply tell. Authorial intrusion was limited if not expunged. Realistic writers attempted to avoid sentimentality or emotional appeal. The three most prominent theorists and practitioners of American Literary Realism are Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Henry James. Self-Assessment Test Describe the significant change that took place after the American civil war Civil War. How did these changes influence literary productions? 3.3 The Prose of the American Civil War As no significant literature was produced during the war, some works however emerged prior to the outbreak of the civil strife and after the war. These works contributed to the war discourse; they provided readers with some meaning to the violence in the country. They in some way influenced the interpretation of the war and directed the way(s) people thought of the fighting. For many people, the Civil War ended slavery. However, the North did not enter the war with the goal of freeing the slaves. Rather, it was to preserve the Union of the country. The South on the other hand wanted to secede in order to protect the institution of slavery. In the North, the literature on slavery and emancipation played an essential role among the populace. It helped to promote the cause of abolition of slavery and to help Northerners understand the significance of emancipation when it did arrive. Such works were tagged the literature of emancipation. They were integral to the literature of the war itself. Harriet Beecher Stowe was one of the authors whose works is a literature of emancipation. Her fiction was significant enough to create international feeling on the issue of slavery. She was one of the many women writers who largely dominated American popular literature. The daughter of a famed Northern Congregationalist preacher, Lyman Beecher, and the wife and sister of many more preachers, she felt all the moral force of the abolition issue. She had never lived in the South and did not know slave life at first hand. When she lived in Cincinnati, she had contact with many fugitive slaves fleeing to the North. She turned her sentimental mode of writing to the moral subject of slavery in Uncle Tom's Cabin, which first appeared as a serial in an antislavery weekly from 1815 to 1852. It increased in length as interest grew, and then came out as a book in 1852. It had extraordinary impact. It sold more than 300,000 copies in the United States and a million and a half worldwide, making it one of the greatest international best-sellers ever. Stowe followed it with the fictionalized account of a slave rebellion; Dred: A Tale of the Dismal Swamp (1854). It was an equally interesting, if less well-known, novel. She also published, The Key to "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (1853) to show that she had drawn extensively on abolitionist materials and slave "narratives" for the "truth of her story. But like all books that change the world, Uncle Tom's Cabin was problematic. The book unquestionably established black life from a white version of it. It provoked innumerable counter-versions from slave-owners who put out versions of contented slave life. These appeared in fiction in the next three years. For black writers, it had more complex and longer-lasting impact, as it depicted motifs, representations of black speech and black character, and stereotypes of black life. This was to shape future fiction and popular culture. The independent representation of the black in fiction would not emerge until the turn of the century. 4.0 Conclusion America experienced significant change after the Civil War and toward the end of the nineteenth century. America began to emerge as a more unified nation as it moved into the Industrial Age. There was a subsequent rise in the middle class for the first time in America. The economic, social and political landscape began to change. Women became more vocal. They argued for the right to vote, to own property, and to earn their own living. African-Americans too began to rise to social and political prominence. The war produced considerable historical writing but no great fictional work. None of the major writers of its generation participated actively. Rather, what was produced was another kind of literary expression. Non-fictional works such as speeches, sermons, reportage, soldiers' songs and popular battle hymns were common. Works such as Harriet Beecher Stowe‘s Uncle Tom's Cabin however were seminal in understanding the call for the abolition of slavery. Slavery was a crucial issue that led to the war. 5.0 Summary In this Unit, we have focused on fiction during and around the American Civil War period. Also discussed in this Unit is one of the key texts emanating out of the slavery issue and the Civil War. This is Harriet Beecher Stowe‘s Uncle Tom's Cabin. It is a significant works of prose-fiction that highlighted the fundamental issue behind the war. It also swayed the popular perception about slavery and pushed the ideology for the abolition of slavery. The post war scenario invariably led to the emergence of a realist tradition which will be the focus of the subsequent unit. 6.0 Tutor-Marked Assignments 1. Discuss the influence of the civil war in relation to the emergence of a realist literary tradition in America. 7.0 References/ Further Reading Brownlee, Peter John and Daniel Greene, curators. Home Front: Daily Life in the Civil War North. Exhibition co-organized by the Newberry Library and the Terra Foundation for American Art. 2013. Coviello, Peter. ―Battle Music: Melville and the Forms of War‖ in Melville and Aesthetics, edited by Samuel Otter and Geoffrey Sandborn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 193–212. Daniel Aaron, The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War, 1973. Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War, 1962. Fahs, Alice. The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North & South, 1861– 1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). Gardner, Eric. Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009). Hager, Christopher and Cody Marrs. ―Against 1865: Reperiodizing the Nineteenth Century.‖ Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 1, no. 2 (Fall 2013): 259–284. Layson, Hana, and Justine Murison. ―Literature of the American Civil War‖ https://dcc.newberry.org/collections/literature-of-the-american-civil-war Richard Roland and Malcolm Bradbury, From Puritanism to Post-Modernism: A History of American Literature, 1991. Terra Foundation for American Art. The Civil War in Art: Teaching and Learning through Chicago Collections. 2012. Wilson, Ivy. ―‗Are You Man Enough?‘: Imagining Ethiopia and Transnational Black Masculinity.‖ Callaloo 33, no. 1 (2010): 265–277. Wimsatt, Mary Ann. ―William Gilmore Simms.‖ American National Biography Online (Feb. 2000). Richard Ruland and Malcolm Bradbury (1991), From Puritanism to Post-Modernism: A History of American Literature. Edmlund Wilson (1962), Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War. Danizl Aaron (1973). The Unwritten American Writers and the Civil War. Module 3 Unit 2 Development of Realist Fiction 1.0 Introduction 2.0 Objectives 3.0 Main Content 3.1 General Overview 3.2 Development of the Realist Novel 3.3 Characteristics of Realist Writings 4.0 Conclusion 5.0 Summary 6.0 Tutor-Marked Assignments 7.0 References/ Further Reading 1.0 Introduction In this unit you will learn about the realist fiction in American literature. You will explore how this mode grew out of a disenchantment with the romance. You will also learn about the early realist writers and some of their writings. 2.0 Objectives At the end of this unit, you should be able to i. Discuss the emergence of realist writing in American literature ii. Explain the reason for its growth iii. Identify key writers of this mode iv. Discuss the characteristics of realist writings 3.0 Main Content 3.1 General Overview Classic American realism of the period between 1865-1900 did not come into existence as a violent break with tradition. It was also not a movement guided by a well worked out theory of realism. It equally was not supported by writers who were intent on writing novels that would stand as successful illustration of their own realist program. What stood at the beginning were rather interventions into the literary world of the romance. These interventions however had their cultural purpose. They served as literary devices to establish a cultural vision that evolved out of an advanced stage of American Victorianism. Briefly speaking, attempts in the mode of writing that later came to be called realism can be seen as symbolic strategies to influence the definition of American society after the Civil War. Reflecting the crucial role which the idea of civilization played for the self-definition, events in the 19th century such as the Civil War was regarded as a watershed in American history. The divided nation was reunited; slavery, its last moral blemish, had finally been abolished. In the first example of American realism, Miss Ravenel's Conversion, John William DeForest suggests that the union between North and South holds the promise of a new America which now seems ready to enter a stage in the development of human civilization never before attained. This new stage, however, was still a promise; it had yet to become a reality. Outworn cultural conventions and a widespread persistence of foolish romantic notions prevented American society from realizing its full potential. It was here that literature was called upon to play a most important role as moral and intellectual stimulus that would convert readers to a full perception of the potential of American civilization. This would be achieved through realistic depictions of society. However, in what way could the novel generate a reading that would correspond to realism's theory of gaining knowledge? At first, the American realists seem to have assumed that it would be sufficient to expose the idle lies about human nature and the social fabric on which the romance based its effects. The potential of American civilization would then become self-evident. Common sense and common vision would prevail. Such a strategy explains, for example, the predominance of domestic romance such as courtship and marriage in the realist novel. Broadly defined as "the faithful representation of reality" or "verisimilitude," realism is a literary technique practiced by many schools of writing. Although strictly speaking, realism is a technique, it also denotes a particular kind of subject matter, especially the representation of middle-class life. A reaction against romanticism, an interest in scientific method, the systematizing of the study of documentary history, and the influence of rational philosophy all affected the rise of realism. As Donald Pizer notes in his introduction to The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism: Howells to London, the term "realism" is difficult to define, in part because it is used differently in European contexts than in American literature. Pizer suggests that "whatever was being produced in fiction during the 1870s and 1880s that was new, interesting, and roughly similar in a number of ways can be designated as realism. An equally new, interesting, and roughly similar body of writing produced at the turn of the century can be designated as naturalism" (5). In American literature, the term "realism" encompasses the period of time from the Civil War to the turn of the century during which William Dean Howells, Rebecca Harding Davis, Henry James, Mark Twain, and others wrote fiction devoted to accurate representation and an exploration of American lives in various contexts. 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 middle-class affluence provided a fertile literary environment for readers interested in understanding these rapid shifts in culture. In drawing attention to this connection, Amy Kaplan has called realism a "strategy for imagining and managing the threats of social change" (Social Construction of American Realism ix). Realism was a movement that encompassed the entire country, or at least the Midwest and South, although many of the writers and critics associated with realism (notably W. D. Howells) were based in New England. Among the Midwestern writers considered realists would be Joseph Kirkland, E. W. Howe, and Hamlin Garland; the Southern writer John W. DeForest's Miss Ravenal's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty is often considered a realist novel, too. 3.2 Development of the Realist Novel The realistic novel began to find its way to the reading public in America by opening up new areas of subject matter that belonged to the lower and middle class people. The fictions of Mark Twain and William Dean Howells, who were perhaps the most well-read story writers in that mode, provoked often a humorous social criticism of the 19th-century American life. Henry James dealt with the realism of the human consciousness in a most subtle and eccentric way. After the civil-war, the writers with their critics and audiences started to feel interested in an exclusively American culture which would show the ways of life and thought that were native entities rather than imported products. They craved for specifically American civilization. One that addressed American thought and feeling. William Dean Howells earned distinction as a highly influential literary critic, championing the realist writing of American authors such as Henry James, Mark Twain, and Stephen Crane (Galens, 2002, p. 248). In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain takes use of the advantages of, among other things, the vernacular, point of view, setting, satire, irony, and innocence portraiture. He produces the tale of a young boy whose disrespect to overwhelming conventions helps the reader to envision a world where there is not only no inequality between humans but also no ignorance, greed, and cruelty. However, this story does not move from plot to character, for the author creates a picaresque story that is based on a series of extraordinary incidents undertaken mainly by Huck Finn whom the story exposes to various social worlds. The fact that the viewpoint of this young boy is the central perspective from which the reader has to look implies a decrease in the role of any kind of authorial omniscience. The reader has an occasion to look at the thoughts of Huck who writes his story in the first-person point of view. As well as a successful search for freedom, reading this novel is a process of interpreting the consciousness of a main character who has started to see the world in his own way. As Huck and Jim voyage down the Mississippi river, the reader can see them in moral conflict with the received values of their society. Also, presenting the life of innocence in human society marks out Twain‗s realism (Kolb, 1969, p. 73). Integral to the mission of the main character is his escape from the overwhelming conventions of society and his attachment to the natural rhythms of life. The main character is an unsophisticated fourteen-year-old boy who is quite innocent and has no experience about the decadent life of the adults who believe that slavery is just. His "freedom ride" is for the eradication of whatever segregates man from man and puts one man in a socially privileged position over another. 3.3 Characteristics of Realist Writing  1. Renders reality closely and in comprehensive detail. Selective presentation of reality with an emphasis on verisimilitude, even at the expense of a well-made plot 2. Character is more important than action and plot; complex ethical choices are often the subject. 3. Characters appear in their real complexity of temperament and motive; they are in explicable relation to nature, to each other, to their social class, to their own past. 4. Class is important; the novel has traditionally served the interests and aspirations of an insurgent middle class. 5. Events will usually be plausible. Realistic novels avoid the sensational, dramatic elements of naturalistic novels and romances. 6. Diction is natural vernacular, not heightened or poetic; tone may be comic, satiric, or matter-of-fact. 7. Objectivity in presentation becomes increasingly important: overt authorial comments or intrusions diminished as the century progressed. 4.0 Conclusion Realism is so strongly associated with the late nineteenth century that it tends to represent the age. It has become a literary symbol of industrial economics and has been labeled by many critics as a middle-class institution. It is important to remember that any literary form is always working either in tandem with or against alternative forms of discourse. The socially conscious aim of realist writing does allow a comparison to other types of discourse with a shared ethical mission. These include sermonic discourse and educational discourse. When critics evaluate realism solely as a narrative style or a mode of representation, they limit the possibilities for understanding it in relation to a larger cultural context such as competing claims to cultural authority. This limitation may be an inherent flaw in the history of literary criticism that ignores alternative discourses against which realist writers styled their texts. More precisely, it has proven to be nearly impossible to offer a consistent paradigmatic description of realism. The reason for this is that other important expressions of literary and cultural authority are overlooked in the attempt. 5.0 Summary Realist writers of the nineteenth century grappled with a method of writing that purported to be both new and more truthful than previous modes of literary representation. This is a paradoxical classification because it assumes there are degrees of realness or truthfulness. These are categories that should be absolute. Realist writings are assumed to be superior literature which comes closest to representing the tangible world. Closely connected to the belief in the relative superiority of realist literature is the aesthetic implication that literature has a transformative capacity in relation to social behavior and ethical practices. Realists assert such literary authority by suggesting that the writer functions as a social scientist looking for truisms in culture. This is really an attempt to narrow the conditions of certainty regarding that which is knowable. Such a claim shifts the philosophical focus of the pursuit of truth and knowledge from an intuitive grasp of the ideal realm to the immediate physical world and the experience of interacting with the world of objects and things. For example, when comparing the observational skills of the writer to the expertise required of the natural scientist, William Dean Howells writes: ―But let fiction cease to lie about life; let it portray men and women as they are, actuated by the motives and the passions we all know; let it leave off painting dolls and working them by springs and wires‖ (Criticism and Fiction 104). In other words, realist writers began to base their literary authority on the assumption that what they produced was more real, more truthful, and more authoritative than the work of their predecessors, and they tried to develop literary paradigms that reinforced this ideology. 6.0 Tutor-marked Assignment 1. Discuss the development of the realist mode in American literature 2. List five American realist novelists and their works 7.0 References/ Further Reading Armstrong, Nancy (2005). How Novels Think: The Limits of British Individualism from 1719-1900. New York: Columbia UP. Arvin, Newton. (2015). ―Homage to Robert Herrick.‖ New Republic 5 Mar. 1935. www.newrepublic.com. Web. 10 July 2015. Baym, Nina. (1981). ―Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Literature Exclude Women Authors.‖ American Quarterly 33.2: 123-39. Beard, George Miller. (1972). American Nervousness, Its Causes and Consequences. New York: Arno Press and the New York Times. Bell, Michael Davitt (1993). The Problem of American Realism: Studies in The Cultural History of a Literary Idea. Chicago: U of Chicago P. Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition Lathrop George Parsons (1874), 'The Novel and its Future," Atlantic Monthly 34 (September 1874):313 24. Abeln, Paul (2005). William Dean Howells and the Ends of Realism. Routledge: New York. Adams, Henry (2000). The Education of Henry Adams. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company,. Adams, Henry (1985). ―William James, Henry James, John La Farge, and the Foundations of Radical Empiricism.‖ American Art Journal 17, no. 1 (Winter,): 60-67. Adams, Henry, et al. (1987). John La Farge: Essays. New York: Abbeville Press. Adams, Steven (1994). The Barbizon School and the Origins of Impressionism. London: Phaidon. Anesko, Michael, ed. (1997). Letters, Fictions, Lives: Henry James and William Dean Howells. New York: Oxford University Press. Booth, Wayne C. (1961). The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Bowron, Bernard R. (1951). "Realism in America." In Comparative Literature, Vol. 3, No. 3: 268-285. Chase, Richard. (1957). The American Novel and Its Tradition. NY: Doubleday & Company, inc. Fluck, Winfried. (2003). ―American Culture and Modernity: A Twice-Told Tale. ―in REAL: The Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, vol. 19. 65-80. Galens, David. (ed.). (2002). Literary Movements for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Literary Movements. Detroit: Thompson. Lawrence, Kathy Kurtzman. (2004). ―Margaret Fuller‗s Aesthetic Transcendentalism and Its Legacy.‖ in The America Renaissance. Edited and with an Introduction by Harold Bloom. NY: Chelsea House Publishers. 273-296. Kolb, Harold H. (1969). The Illusion of Life: American Realism as a Literary Form. Charlottesville: The UP. Of Virginia. Matthiessen, F. O. (1941). American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. New York: Oxford UP. Miller, Perry. (1967). "The Romance and the Novel." in Nature‗s Nation. Massachusetts: The Belknap Press (of Harvard UP.): 241-278. Pizer, Donald. (1984). Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (revised edition). Carbondale. State Illinois UP. Salomon, Roger B. (1964). "Realism as Disinheritance: Twain, Howells, and James." in American Quarterly, vol. 16: 531-544. Veeder, William and Susan M. Griffin (Eds.) (1968). The Art of Criticism: Henry James on the Theory and the Practice of Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P. MODULE 3 UNIT 3 Naturalism in American Literature 1.0 Introduction 2.0 Objectives 3.0 Main Content 3.1 General Overview 3.2 Characteristics of Naturalism 3.2.1 Determinism 3.2.2 Objectivism 3.2.3 Pessimism 3.2.4 Surprising Twist at the end of the Story 3.3 Influence of Naturalism on American Literature 3.3.1 Jack London The Call of the Wild 3.3.2 Theodore Dreiser Sister Carrie 3.3.3 Ernest Hemingway 4.0 Conclusion 5.0 Summary 6.0 Tutor-marked Assignment 7.0 Reference/ Further Reading 3.0 Main Content 3.1 General Overview Naturalism was first proposed and formulated by French novelist Emile Zola, the French writer and theorist who is known as the founder of literary naturalism. Naturalism is a literary movement that took place from 1865 to 1900. It used an advanced form of realism to discuss how social conditions, heredity and environment shape human character. Writers of the Naturalist mode are influenced by Charles Darwin‘s theory of evolution. They believed that a person‘s heredity and social environment determine his/her character. They also believe that heredity and social environment influence the actions of people. Naturalism was introduced to America by American novelist Frank Norris. It is a more extreme form of realism. It is a theory in literature that emphasizes scientific observation of life without idealism or the avoidance of the ugly. American literature naturalists dismissed comforting moral truths. They attempted to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness. They presented characters of low social and economic classes who were dominated by their environment and heredity. The ideas of naturalism pervaded the works of such writers as Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, Henry Adams, Theodore Dreiser, and Ernest Hemingway. 3.2 Characteristics of Naturalism Naturalism is a harsher form of realism. The term Naturalism came from Emile Zola. It is believed that he sought a new idea to convince the reading public of something new and more modern in his fiction. He argued that his innovation in fiction-writing was the creation of characters and plots based on the scientific method. Skinnerian principles of learning through conditioning and the Darwinian hierarchy of the survival of the fittest are the underlying themes involved in shaping the human character. There are many defining characteristics of literary naturalism. They include: 3.2.1 Determinism Determinism is the opposite of the idea that there is free will. In determinism, individual characters do not have a direct influence on the course of their lives. Rather, it is supplanted by a focus on nature or fate. As human beings live in natural environment, they can react toward the exterior and interior forces but are helpless before these forces (Lin Xianghua, 1989, p.528). Often, a naturalist author will lead the reader to believe that a character's fate has been pre-determined, usually by heredity and environmental factors. Such writer also depicts that the destiny of humanity is misery in life and oblivion in death and that he/she can do nothing about it. 3.2.2 Objectivism Naturalist authors often try to maintain a tone that will be experienced as 'objective.' The author presents himself or herself as an objective observer, similar to a scientist taking note of what he or she sees. Of course, no human being can ever be truly objective. However, by detaching the narrator from the story he or she tells, an author can achieve objectivity. Also, an author will sometimes achieve detachment by creating nameless characters. This is more common among modernists such as Ernest Hemingway). This puts the focus more on the plot and what happens to the character, rather than the characters themselves. 3.2.3 Pessimism Very often, one or more characters will continue to repeat one line or phrase that tends to have a pessimistic connotation. They sometimes emphasize the inevitability of death. Naturalistic works often include uncouth or sordid subject matter. For example, Emile Zola‘s works showed frankness about sexuality along with a pervasive pessimism. Naturalistic works exposed the dark harshness of life, including poverty, racism, sex, prejudice, disease, prostitution, and filth. The naturalistic novel offers clinical, panoramic, slice of life drama that is often a chronicle of despair. 3.2.4 Surprising Twist at the End of the Story In naturalist novels and stories, there tends to be a strong sense that nature is indifferent to human struggle. Characters are frequently but not invariably ill-educated or lower class characters whose lives are governed by the forces of heredity, instinct, and passion. Their attempts at exercising free will or choice are hamstrung by forces beyond their control. Self-Assessment Test 1. Discuss any two characteristic of Naturalist writing. 2. Who is the father of literary naturalism? 3. Who popularized Naturalism in America? 3.3 Influence of Naturalism on American Literature Influenced by European naturalists, especially by Emile Zola, at the end of the nineteenth century, a generation of writers arose in America. Their ideas of the workings of the universe and the perception of society‘s disorders led them to naturalism. This was a new and harsher realism. 3.3.1 Jack London The Call of the Wild Jack London (1876-1916) was one of the most popular American writers of his time and regarded as one of the greatest naturalist novelists of America. He has been in the forefront of the move toward naturalistic fiction and realism in America. He has been deeply influenced by Darwin's ideas of constant struggle in nature and ―the survival of the fittest. He shows his philosophy of naturalism completely in The Call of the Wild. The Call of the Wild is a novel that is concerned about a previously domesticated and somewhat pampered dog named Buck, whose primordial instincts return after a series of events. One day he was kidnapped and taken to the north, where he served as a sled dog in the treacherous, frigid Yukon. The bad weather, the terrible Husky dogs, the fights, his dead friend and many things made Buck know he was surrounded by savages. There was no fair play. Only fight and war could help him. Finally, he began to master his new surroundings. His ability to rule and his great intelligence and good judgment were wonders to everyone. Then, Buck was sold once more. It was John Thornton who rescued him and became his new owner. But life was hard for Buck. When they lived in a forest, the Yeehats, an Indian tribe killed all the people, include John. Buck was very angry, and he killed most of the Yeehats. After John‘s death, Buck‘s last tie with people was broken. Finally, he was ready to answer the call of the wild. He ran with wolves, side by side with his wild brothers, shouting as he ran. He sounded the call of the wild. More and more cruelties made Buck realize there is no goodness and kindness in this world. There is only one rule: eat or be eaten off. The environment plays a very important part in The Call of the Wild. The novel shows how the environment controls one's (here dog's and wolf‘s) life. Zola said: ―I still hold my view that the environment plays a very important part,‖ ―When we research a family or a group of people, I think the environment has a chief importance (Zola, 1988, p. 476).‖ Jack London has a deep understanding about environment, so we can clearly see many expressions of Naturalism in The Call of the Wild. As an animal, Buck‘s behaviors represent ―the survival of the fittest. He made himself accustom to the new environment, so he won the right of survival. At the same time, Buck ensured himself the safety with his courage and wisdom in the severe north. As a symbol of human nature, Buck's behaviors indicated the extremely cruel and unfair humanity in misery and the hunger. He was struggling for his life. Facing trouble, to survive is the most important thing. From portraying the dog‘s images to revealing the formation and development of the dog‘s character, the novel embodies obviously genetic determinism and environmental determinism advocated by Zola. Darwin's theory of ―the big fish eat up the small, the fittest survive is fully expressed through Buck's image. 3.3.2 Theodore Dreiser Sister Carrie Theodore Dreiser was one of the outstanding American writers of naturalism. He was the leading figure in a national literary movement that replaced Victorian notions of propriety with the unflinching presentation of real-life subject matter. Among other themes, his novels explore the new social problems that had arisen in a rapidly industrializing America. Sinclair Lewis said in his Nobel Prize Lecture of 1930, that Dreiser's great first novel, Sister Carrie, came to housebound and airless America like a great free Western wind, and to our stuffy domesticity gave us the first fresh air since Mark Twain and Whitman. Sister Carrie tells the story of a pretty small-town girl who comes to the big city filled with vague ambitions. She is used by men and she too uses them in turn to become a successful Broadway actress. The married man who runs away with her, George Hurstwood, loses his grip on life and becomes a beggar. In despair, he commits suicide by gassing himself in his hotel room one night. Meanwhile, Carrie achieves stardom, but finds that money and fame do not satisfy her longings or bring her happiness. Sister Carrie is a work of importance in American literature despite its inauspicious launching. It became a beacon to subsequent American writers whose allegiance was to the realistic treatment of any and all subject matter. With the publication of Sister Carrie in 1900, Dreiser committed his literary force to opening the new ground of American naturalism. His heroes and heroines, his settings, his frank discussion, celebration, and humanization of sex, his clear dissection of the mechanistic brutality of American society, all were new and shocking to a reading public reared on genteel romances and adventure narratives. Dreiser received a reputation as a naturalist. He cleared the trail from Victorian timidity and gentility in American fiction to honesty and boldness and passion of life. Sister Carrie was the first masterpiece of the American naturalistic movement with factual presentation of the vagaries of urban life. It depicted an ingenuous heroine, who goes unpunished for her transgressions against conventional sexual morality. Dreiser does not forget the basic principles of naturalism. On the one hand, the author says that "the world only moves forward because of the services of the exceptional individual". But on the other hand, Hurstwood is also a "chessman" of fate. Like Carrie, her success is mostly the result of chance. Indeed, though turn-of-the-century readers found Dreiser‘s point of view crude and immoral, his influence on the fiction of the first quarter of the century is perhaps greater than any other writer‘s. 3.3.3 Ernest Hemingway Hemingway (1899-1961) was one of the outstanding American writers with naturalistic tendency. His works have sometimes been read as an essentially negative commentary on a modern world filled with sterility, inevitable failure and death, which is just the view of naturalism. His primary concern was an individual‘s ―moment of truth,‖ and his fascination with the threat of physical, emotional, or psychic death is reflected in his lifelong preoccupation with stories of war in A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls. Hemingway‘s stature as a writer was confirmed with the publication of A Farewell to Arms, which portrayed a farewell both to war and to love. Hemingway had rejected the romantic ideal of the ultimate unity of lovers, suggesting instead that all relationship must end in death. The Old Man and the Sea centered upon Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman who struggled with a giant marlin and sharks far out in the Gulf Stream. He ended up with a defeat that the sharps ate the giant marlin which he pulled onto his skiff‘s side and stabbed with all his strength. From portraying Santiago‘s images, the novel embodies obviously environmental determinism. Human beings can react toward the exterior but they are helpless before these forces, men and women are overwhelmed by the force of nature. Yet to Hemingway, man‘s great achievement is to show grace under pressure. The inside of Hemingway's books, is the spirit of the whole nation. He has great influence on his fellow authors, such as J. D. Salinger , Hunter S. Thompson, and Elmore Leonard. 4.0 Conclusion Naturalist fiction in the United States often concentrated on the non-Anglo, ethnically marked inhabitants of the growing American cities, many of them immigrants and most belonging to a class-spectrum ranging from the destitute to the lower middle- class. Writers were skeptical towards, or downright hostile to, the notions of bourgeois individualism that characterized realist novels about middle-class life. Most naturalists demonstrated a concern with the animal or the irrational motivations for human behavior, sometimes manifested in connection with sexuality and violence. In America, naturalism had been shaped by the war, by the social upheavals that undermined the comforting faith of an earlier age, and by the disturbing teachings of Charles Darwin. Darwinism seemed to stress the animality of man, to suggest that he was dominated by the irresistible forces of evolution (Wu Weiren, 1990, p.8) The pessimism and deterministic ideas of naturalism pervaded the works of such writers as Frank Norris, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser and Hemingway. Their detailed descriptions of the lives of the down-trodden and the abnormal, their frank treatment of human passion and sexuality and their portrayal of men and women overwhelmed by the blind forces of nature still exert a powerful influence on modern writer. 5.0 Summary Naturalism is an innovation in fiction-writing. It brought the creation of characters and plots based on the scientific method. Birthed at the end of the nineteenth century by Emile Zola, naturalism saw the emergence of a generation of writers in America whose ideas of the workings of the universe and the perception of society‘s disorders led them to naturalism. Naturalism was a new and harsher realism that took form from Skinnerian principles of learning through conditioning and the Darwinian hierarchy of the survival of the fittest as underlying themes involved in shaping the human character. 6.0 Tutor-Marked Assignments 1. Discuss the defining features of Naturalism 2. In what way(s) is Charles Darwin‘s theory of Evolution connected to Naturalist writing? 7.0 References/ Further Reading Hemingway. (1999). The Old Man and the Sea. Jiangsu: Jiangsu Yilin Press. Hemingway. (2004). A Farewell to Arms. Xi‘an : World Publishing Corporation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_(literature). http://www.gradesaver.com/sister-carrie/e-text/sources/. Lin, Xianghua. A Dictionary of Western Literary Critical Terms. Shanghai: Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. London, Jack. (1994).The Call of Wild [M]. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press. Peter conn. (1989). Literature in American. Cambridge University Press. Sinclair Lewis. Nobel Lecture, December 12, 1930. The Webster‘s Dictionary of the English Language.1989 Lexicon Publications. Wu, Weiren. (1990). History and Anthology of American Literature Volume 2. Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press. Zhang, Chong. (2008). Anthology of American Literature. Shanghai: Fudan University Press. Zhang, Xiaofen. (2010) "On the Influence of Naturalism on American Literature‖. The English Language Teaching: Vol.3 No 2. Zola, (1988). Naturalism. Beijing: China Social Sciences Press. MODULE 4 MODERN AMERICAN LITERATURE 1900-1950 UNIT 1: Modern American Prose 8.0 Introduction 9.0 Objectives 10.0 Main Content 10.1 General Overview 10.2 Samuel Langhorne Clemens 10.3 Earnest Hemingway 10.4 William Dean Howells 11.0 Conclusion 12.0 Summary 13.0 Tutor-Marked Assignments 14.0 References/ Further Reading 1.0 Introduction This unit explores the fundamental features of the American novel between 1910 and 1950. It explores the literary forces that led to the emergence and development of literary modernism. It also examines such ground breaking modernist writings. The unit equally highlights some notable modern American writers. 2.0 Objectives At the end of this unit, you should be able to: i. Discuss the major themes and preoccupations of the modernist era ii. Explain how the disillusionment caused by World War I and the modern industrial order facilitated the emergence and development of modernism. iii. Show understanding of the stylistic developments of modernism iv. List some modern writers and their works 3.0 Main Content 3.1 General Overview The socially and culturally emancipating years between World War I and World War II inspired ground breaking developments in American literature generally. For the American fiction, it had suffered a slow and difficult start. The novel in the formal sense began at the end of the 18th century. It is perhaps natural that it should have been preceded by the chronicles of adventure, the sermons, the diary, history, the essay and verse. It is certain that when the first formal efforts at novel writing appeared in the century, it was at a dull moment in the history of the British novel. The first novel of full length written by an American was The Power of Sympathy, published anonymously in 1780. It has been attributed to Mrs. Sarah Wentworth Morton. The novel may have been written by William Hill Brown, a playwright and the known author of a posthumously printed novel Ira and Isabella but the evidence is not conclusive. The Power of Sympathy publicized the embarrassing account of the love affair between prominent Bostonian Perez Morton and his wife‘s sister. Such books served only to reinforce the moralist‘s judgments against fiction. By the middle of the 19th century, American novelists began to turn from heroic depictions to the material of familiar life. There was a transition from an idealistic to a realistic presentation of life. Characters drawn from the humbler walks of life began to take their place as central figures. The tragedies of economic oppression were portrayed. At the same time, there was still the interest in romance and fantasy. This form often made use of realistic methods but its distinguishing quality lay in the unusual plots, powerful imagination and fantasy and the greatest names in the early fiction of fantasy were those of Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Writing about The Great American Novel, Edith Wharton said that the scene may be laid in an American small town or in a European capital. It could deal with the present or the past, with great events or trivial happenings and it could be related to something greater. Speaking of the American modern novel, the year 1900 is an important year as this was the year in which many changes happened and a new world was born. Great technological advancement changed the attitude of the people and transformed the whole society. Americans felt that the twentieth century was the American century and therefore they felt a responsibility for it. The early years of the century experienced naturalism as the dominant form while some hints of expressionism were also traceable. The second decade of the twentieth century experienced radical changes. World War I made many people and writers believe in decline of civilization. The American mind was under the influence of cultural disorientation and disorder. These reflected in works of notable writers as is highlighted in the next sub- section. 3.2 Samuel Langhorne Clemens The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Well known by his pen name Mark Twain, Samuel Langhorne Clemens was a great humorist. His novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been called ―The Great American Novel‖. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is another noted novel of Mark Twain. He was popular for his wit and incisive satire and was lauded as the greatest American humorist of his age. He won a worldwide audience for his stories of youthful adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. In Green Hills of Africa, Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur‘s Court are some of his famous novels. Twain‘s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an adventure in understanding changes in America itself. The book is at the center of American geography and consciousness. It re-examines definitions of ―civilization‖ and freedom, right and wrong, social responsibility and inhumanity. Published in 1885, the novel recounts those pre-civil war days when the controversy over slavery, with designated slave and Free states, disfigured the face of America and its view of itself as a land of the free. Both geographically and otherwise, the story is an examination of life at the center: the center of America‘s premiere river, the Mississippi in the middle of the geographical United States, with slave states below, free states above. This is the route toward freedom and escape for Huck and Jim. It is also the center of one of the foremost conflicts on American soil, slavery, which soon results in a civil war. It is the center of the coming of age of both a young man and a nation that struggle to understand redefinitions of nationhood and freedom, right and wrong; and the center of a shift from Romanticism to Realism in art and letters that would provide for a new way for Americans to express themselves. The novel offers an excellent example of American picaresque fiction and meaningful use of dialect. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a profoundly important work in American letters. As Shelley Fishkin suggests in ―Teaching Mark Twain‘s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,‖ ―Mark Twain‘s consciousness and awareness is larger than that of any of the characters of the novel… Huck is too innocent and ignorant to understand what‘s wrong with his society and what‘s right about his own transgressive behavior. Twain, on the other hand, knows the score.‖ The novel has stirred controversy since 1885, both as a commentary on American race relations, class divisions, and violence, and as an examination of humanity‘s social responsibility attendant in its pursuit of freedom. It brings to the fore discussions of race, conformity, slavery, freedom, autonomy and authority, and so much more. This novel requires an understanding of the pre-Civil War slavery controversy, free and slave states, and the Mississippi River‘s division of East from West and North from South. The river was a primary conduit for people and goods. It will benefit you to read slave narratives, especially of those who escaped slavery via waterways. Examples are Frederick Douglass, Linda Brent/Harriet Jacobs, and Olaudah Equiano. These oral histories offer a basis on which to consider the portrayal of Jim, a slave in Twain‘s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, as well as the attitudes and life styles that surrounded slavery. Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on November 30, 1835 in Florida, Missouri. When he was four, the Clemens family moved to Hannibal, Missouri. This home would be the site of considerable tragedies for the family which would serve Twain in his future writings. These include the deaths of a younger sister and brother, and his father‘s death from pneumonia when Clemens was twelve years old. In Hannibal, he would also witness the ill treatment of slaves. There was also the violent behavior of both civilized and uncivilized people, the economic disparity among these frontier settlers, and the religious zeal and hypocrisy coexisting in communities. Although Twain moved frequently and ranged widely in the world, it was his upbringing on the Mississippi River that played perhaps the most important role in developing his understanding about the power of imagination and of friendship in harsh circumstances. After his father‘s death, Sam joined his brother Orion at the Hannibal Journal newspaper, where he honed his writing skills and learned typesetting. These skills led to his move to St. Louis and a job as typesetter at the St. Louis Evening News. From there, he moved East to New York City and Philadelphia. Although he traveled widely in America and Europe, he returned at the age of 24 to the Mississippi. This was where he received his pilot‘s license as a river boat pilot. This profession he incorporated into his novels and into his pen name, Mark Twain. He first used the pen name as a writer for the Nevada Territorial Enterprise. Although he enjoyed a fortunate life with his wife Olivia Langdon and his family, the early deaths of his four children would later lead to depression and anxiety. He died in Connecticut at the age of 75. In his works are the characteristic humor, realistic dialect, local color, satire, and humanitarian themes. 3.1.4 Earnest Hemingway (1899-1961) A Farewell to Arms Earnest Hemingway was one of the most important and influential writers of the 20th Century. His fiction, especially his early work was dominated by two types of characters. The first type includes people affected by World War I, people who had become detached and cynical, yet emotionally strong. The second type includes simple, plain-speaking individuals of direct emotions. Death and violence were constant themes in Hemingway‘s life and writing. Hemingway received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954. A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea, To Have and Have Not are some of the famous novels of Hemingway. Hemingway‘s novels brought a great change in the art of storytelling and gave a new dimension to fiction. Hemingway belonged to the American Adamic tradition, with its commitment to the primacy of the individual, the supreme importance of the single, separate self. Consistently, for Hemingway, as for many earlier American writers, the essential condition of life is solitary, and the interesting, only really serious business, is the management of that solitude. Hemingway is one of the many American writers who lived during World War I. He wrote a number of well-known war novels and the most famous of them is the war novel titled A Farewell to Arms which he wrote in 1929. It focuses on the effects of the war as a blow to human civilization. It calls to question the civilization human kind claims. The novel is based on the themes of war and love. He engaged irony to show contrast between the ideal and the real of the world of war. The war severely affected Hemingway and he became disillusioned and depressed. The novel is based on Hemingway's own experience as a participant in World War I. He enlisted in the war as an ambulance driver in the Italian army. He joined the army purposely for his own romantic notions about war. This novel remarkably reflects his attitudes towards war as the novel shows how he saw the war with all its ugliness, violence, insanity, and irrationality. Besides giving an accurate account of the war, Hemingway gives an insightful description of the psychology of the soldiers. Tired with war and its irrationality, the soldiers begin to search for peace. He was initially enthusiastic before enlisting for war but he became depressed and pessimistic by the time he returned from the war. He was seriously wounded in 1918 at the Italian front when a large number of Austrian mortar shell fell nearly. One of his comrades died instantaneously and another one lost his legs. Hemingway lost consciousness as a result of the shock. After regaining his consciousness, he tried to rescue one of his injured comrades by carrying him to a nearby first aid dugout. During this course, he was shot in his leg by a machine gun fire. The effect of all these is captured in his introduction the book Men at War: "when you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people got killed; not you. Then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion." Like many Americans in the pre-war period, Hemingway took World War One as an adventure and therefore; participated in it with great zeal. During the war, he saw the difference between the ideal world and the real world of war. The novel has Frederic Henry as its central character through whom Hemingway expresses his disillusionment with the war. As an American enlisted in the Italian Army, Henry goes through the horrifying experience of war. Observing the irrationality and absurdity of the war, Henry tries to escape from it in order to find what he calls 'separate peace' alone with Catherine Barkley, a nurse he falls in love with. He receives the worst blow when Catherine dies in childbirth leaving Henry alone in the world. Through the plight of Henry, Hemingway has tries to convey that an escape is not always possible in life. Peace can't be achieved in isolation from others. Hemingway advocates for endurance because he feels that life is essentially tragic. The theme of war in this novel is woven with the theme of love. War contrasts sharply with the noble emotion of love. In fact the novel can be called a tragic love story of Henry and Catherine set the First World War. 3.4 William Dean Howells For Howells, realism was the appropriate response to the drastic changes taking place in America in the late nineteenth century. He believed that the writer who could achieve that realism could also be described as the creator of a truly democratic, essentially American art that captured the importance and the meaning of the commonplace. Howells was eventually to occupy a position at the center of literary life in America. Howells had pieces published in various national magazines. The first of his forty or so novels, Their Wedding Journey (1872) and A Chance Acquaintance (1873), made use of his travels abroad. These were followed by two fictions dealing with the contrast between Americans and Europeans, A Foregone Conclusion (1874) and A Lady of Aroostook (1879). With his first major novel, A Modern Instance (1882), Howells moved beyond explorations of manners to detailed and serious consideration of wider social issues. The novel is structured around the twin themes of divorce and journalism. Howells was the first novelist to focus on journalism, and developed the theme of divorce after attending a performance of a Greek tragedy. It is a book on what would happen to a couple whose marriage gradually deteriorates. What is remarkable about it is the way that, in a strategy characteristic of literary realism, it links the personal and the political, the emotional and the social. Howell‘s 1885 novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham, also demonstrates what he called the ―fidelity to experience and probability of motive‖ that he felt was an imperative for the American storyteller. It also invites the reader to what he called ―the appreciation of the common.‖ 4.0 Conclusion The social and cultural implications of World War I and World War II inspired ground breaking developments in American literature generally. The novel in the formal sense began at the end of the 18th century. By this century, American novelists focused on the material of familiar life. There was a transition from an idealistic to a realistic presentation of life. Characters drawn from the humbler walks of life began to take their place as central figures. The tragedies of economic oppression were portrayed. At the same time, there was still the interest in romance and fantasy. This form often made use of realistic methods but its distinguishing quality lay in the unusual plots, powerful imagination and fantasy and the greatest names in the early fiction of fantasy. Writing about The Great American Novel, Edith Wharton said that the scene may be laid in an American small town or in a European capital. It could deal with the present or the past, with great events or trivial happenings and it could be related to something greater. 5.0 Summary The year 1900 is an important year for the American modern novel. This was the year in which many changes happened and a new world was born. Great technological advancement changed the attitude of the people and transformed the whole society. Americans felt that the twentieth century was the American century and therefore they felt a responsibility for it. The early years of the century experienced naturalism as the dominant form while some hints of expressionism were also traceable. The second decade of the twentieth century experienced radical changes. World War I made many people and writers believe in decline of civilization. The American mind was under the influence of cultural disorientation and disorder. 6.0 Tutor-Marked Assignments Discuss the influence of World war one on Ernest Hemingway‘s A Farewell to Arms. 7.0 References/ Further Reading