American Renaissance & American Romanticism
Terms & Themes

Realism, Local Color, and Naturalism

Realism

major American authors: William Dean Howells (1837-1920), Henry James (1843-1916), Mark Twain (1835-1910), Edith Wharton (1862-1937)

European antecedents and contemporaries: Gustave Flaubert (France, 1821-80) (Madame Bovary, 1857); Honore de Balzac (France, 1799-1850) (La Comedie humaine, 1842-48); Leo Tolstoy (Russia, War and Peace)

later American writers in tradition: Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), Louis Auchincloss (1917- ), Kay Boyle (1903- )

stylistic tendencies: verisimilitude; urban settings; meetings of differing classes or of Americans with Europeans ("the international theme"); accuracy of speech patterns; accuracy in human motivation; "social problem novel"

romantic survivals: romantic fantasies tend to be internalized, within characters' consciousness.

Local Color or Regionalism

major American authors: Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896), Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909), Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930), Kate Chopin (1851-1904), Bret Harte (1836-1902), George Washington Cable (1844-1925), Charles C. Chesnutt (1858-1932), Willa Cather (1873-1947)

European antecedents: possibly Ivan Turgenev (Russia and France, 1818-83) (The Hunting Sketches, 1847-1851), but, as a "local" tradition, the movement's influences are open to question.

later writers in this tradition: Zona Gale (1874-1938), William Faulkner (1897-1962), Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964), Eudora Welty (1909- ), Marjorie Rawlings (1896-1953), Katherine Anne Porter (1890- )

stylistic tendencies: short story is dominant genre; local dialects; legends or folk tales; stories often "framed" by an outside narrator who gives over to a dialect narrator

romantic survivals: rural landscapes; folk manners; kinship systems; sentimental characters; nostalgia

 (Some sources add "veritism" to Realism's list of movements.  This theory by Hamlin Garland [in Crumbling Idols (1894)] asserts a more scientific standpoint than Howells's moralism and emphasis on the "smiling" aspects of life but also opposes the "immoralism" of mainstream Naturalism derived from Zola.  However, Garland's best work, such as the short story "Under the Lion's Paw," resembles naturalism, though perhaps less pessimistic and more reform-minded.)

Naturalism

major American authors: Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) (Sister Carrie, 1900; The Financier, 1912; An American Tragedy, 1925); Stephen Crane (1871-1900) (Maggie, a Girl of the Streets, 1893; The Red Badge of Courage, 1895; "The Open Boat," "The Blue Hotel"), Frank Norris (1870-1902) (McTeague, 1899; The Octopus, 1901), Jack London (1876-1916) (The Sea Wolf, 1904; "The Law of Life"); Robert Herrick (1868-1938) (The Memoirs of an American Citizen, 1905; The Master of the Inn, 1908)

European antecedents and contemporaries: Emile Zola (France, 1840-1902), novelist (Nana 1880; Le Roman experimental, 1880); Hippolyte Taine (France, 1828-1893), philosopher and historian ("la race, le milieu, et le moment"); Thomas Hardy (England, 1840-1928) (Tess of the D'Urbervilles, 1891)

American antecedents: Rebecca Harding Davis (1831-1910) (Life in the Iron Mills, 1861); Herman Melville (1819-91)

later American writers in tradition: Faulkner (Old Man and others), Paul Louis Dunbar (1872-1906) (The Sport of the Gods, 1902), Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) (Winesburg, Ohio, 1919; Poor White, 1920), James Farrell (1904- ) (Studs Lonigan, 1934), Ralph Ellison (1914- ) (Invisible Man, 1952), Richard Wright (1908-1960) (Native Son, 1940), John Steinbeck (1902-68) (The Grapes of Wrath, 1939)

stylistic tendencies: monotony, boredom, and violence of modern urban life; or, occasionally, primitive life on the frontier; interest in social relations evolving from Darwinian biology, social Darwinism ("survival of the fittest"), and plutocracy; concern with lower levels of society than Howells, Wharton, and James, plus effect of environment on these classes; viewpoint aims at detached, scientific objectivity regarding human subjects; psychological interests in deep-seated impulses of will or desire; environment or instincts determine human behavior; corresponding lack of human free will (compare Calvinism); tendency by author not to make moral judgments.

romantic survivals: extreme, exotic, or dramatic natural environments; semi-heroic individual struggling against a hostile or indifferent environment

Historical influences: Darwinian biology; laissez-faire capitalism; Calvinism (unknowable and random God in irrational cosmos); Taine's theory of "race, moment, and environment"; the Nietzschean "superman"