Mark Twain’s work demonstrates his commitment to realism as well as his desire to portray life in his native Missouri. Rebecca Harding Davis is best known as a pioneering realist and the author of “Life in the Iron-Mills” (1861), an incredibly popular story about the plight of industrial workers, their lack of access to art, and their temptations to crime. Rather than the remote or strange, realists wrote about the ordinary, the probable, about characters who seemed like real people in situations that real people routinely experience.
According to Howells, realism “is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.” Realists found fault with the Romantic and the sentimental for what was perceived as untruthful idealizing, offering instead detailed portraits of the everyday. was William Dean Howells, editor of the most prestigious literary periodical of the time, the Atlantic Monthly. Realism was a literary movement that originated in Europe and became popular in United States. But though she wrote in meter, Dickinson wasn’t afraid to break the rules, building in pauses through her extensive use of dashes, writing in fragments and enjambed lines, and repeatedly using slant rhyme. Her poems are usually composed of alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, the meter of nursery rhymes and many hymns. (A more extensive collection of her poems appeared in 1890.) Her nearly 1800 surviving lyric poems frequently confront death, but she was also interested in nature, spirituality, and everyday life. Dickinson was little known in her own lifetime-only seven of her poems had been published, and these anonymously. The postbellum period saw the first publication of the poems of Emily Dickinson, a poet who, like Whitman, would fundamentally reshape American verse. In an era in which slavery had been abolished but the rights of African Americans remained tentative at best, new black voices rose to national recognition, as did new Native American voices, protesting the continued encroachment on native lands and new educational policies that sought to strip Native Americans of their cultural identities. The literary marketplace grew rapidly, allowing authorship to become a far more accessible career option than it had been, especially for African Americans, Native Americans, immigrants, and women. In the place of sentimentalism and transcendentalism arose three related literary modes that dominated postbellum American fiction: realism, regionalism, and naturalism. Urbanization increased rapidly, as did immigration, Darwin’s theory of evolution shook up former certainties, and new technologies like the Transcontinental Railroad and the telephone altered how Americans connected with one another. These literary modes never really disappeared-Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868), for example, drew on all three-but the rapid changes occurring in American life seemed to many to necessitate new forms of literary expression. The devastation of the Civil War seriously challenged the faith in the power of sympathy, family, and God that undergirded sentimentalism as well as the romantic optimism that powered transcendentalism and the antebellum reform movements.
0 kommentar(er)
