2130_American Lit Module 1 _Realism and Naturalism

Realism and Naturalism

The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company

• The realist novel: a substantial work in prose that offers verisimilitude of detail, a norm of experience, and an objective view of human nature

• William Dean Howells says that literary realism “is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material”

Realism


• Realist novels were set in believable, everyday locales; naturalist novels had extreme settings

• Realistic characters were usually middle class; naturalistic ones lower class

• Realist plots worked toward the restoration of order; in naturalist novels, the characters confront major crises and are destroyed by them

• A realist might suggest that good prevails, but naturalist characters are doomed by fate

Naturalism


William Dean Howells


“Will the reader be content to accept a novel which is an analytic study rather than a story, which is apt to leave him arbiter of the destiny of the author’s creations? Will he find his account in the unflagging interest of their development?”

William Dean Howells:“Henry James, Jr.”


“It is a well ascertained fact concerning the imagination that it can work only with the stuff of experience. It can absolutely create nothing; it can only compose . . . Once for all, then, obedience to this law is the creed of the realist, and rebellion is the creed of the romanticist.”

William Dean Howells:“Novel-Writing and Novel Reading”


• How do the characters in this story articulate their experience of reality through literary and nonliterary texts?– quoting Richard Lovelace’s poem “To Lucasta”– referencing journalism about the Spanish-

American War

• How do they experience reality in a direct and unmediated fashion?

William Dean Howells:“Editha”


Henry James


• “[Y]ou will not write a good novel unless you possess the sense of reality.”

• “Experience . . . is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spiderweb of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every airborne particle in its tissue.”

Henry James:“The Art of Fiction”


Frank Norris


“Terrible things must happen to the characters of the naturalistic tale. They must be twisted from the ordinary, wrenched out from the quiet, uneventful found of every-day life, and flung into the throes of a vast and terrible drama that works itself out in unleashed passions, in blood, and in sudden death . . . It is all romantic, at times unmistakably so.”

Frank Norris: “Zola as a Romantic Writer”


• “Romance . . . is the kind of fiction that takes cognizance of variations from the type of normal life. Realism is the kind of fiction that confines itself to the type of normal life.”

• “[T]o Romance belongs the wide world for range, and the unplumbed depths of the human heart . . . and the problems of life.”

Frank Norris:“A Plea for Romantic Fiction”


Theodore Dreiser


“The extent of all reality is the realm of the author’s pen, and a true picture of life, honestly and reverentially set down, is both moral and artistic whether it offends conventions or not.”

Theodore Dreiser:“True Art Speaks Plainly”


Jack London


“I was down in the cellar of society, down in the subterranean depths of misery about which it is neither nice nor proper to speak. I was in the pit, the abyss, the human cesspool, the shambles and the charnel-house of our civilization. This is the part of the edifice of society that society chooses to ignore.”

Jack London:“What Life Means to Me”

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Realism and Naturalism

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2130_American Lit Module 1 _Realism and Naturalism

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