Realism and Naturalism

Realism and Naturalism PDF Author: Richard Daniel Lehan
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299208745
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
In this intellectual and literary history of American, British, and Continental novels of realism and naturalism from 1850 to 1950, Richard Lehan argues that literary naturalism is a narrative mode that creates its own reality. Employing this strategy allows and encourages intertextuality - one novel talking or responding to another.

Realism and Naturalism

Realism and Naturalism PDF Author: Richard Daniel Lehan
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299208745
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 358

Get Book

Book Description
In this intellectual and literary history of American, British, and Continental novels of realism and naturalism from 1850 to 1950, Richard Lehan argues that literary naturalism is a narrative mode that creates its own reality. Employing this strategy allows and encourages intertextuality - one novel talking or responding to another.

Realism and Naturalism

Realism and Naturalism PDF Author: Richard Daniel Lehan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780299208707
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Lehan's book provides readers with an illuminating and readable comprehensive intellectual and literary history of the major American, British, and Continental novels of Realism and Naturalism from 1850 to 1950. He offers readers a new way of reading these novels-working outward from the text to forms of historical representation. In this way, literary naturalism can be seen as a narrative mode that creates its own reality separate from that of other narrative modes. Employing this strategy, Lehan contends, readers will find a spectrum of meaning in these works that allows and encourages intertextuality-one novel talking or responding to another-for example, Zola's Nana to Dreiser's Sister Carrie or Zola's L'Assomoir to Sinclair's The Jungle. The range of novelists and sub genres is staggering-Lehan studies the gothic novel, the urban novel, the detective novel, the novel of imperial adventure, the western novel, the noir novel, and the novels of utopia and distopia.

Documents of American Realism and Naturalism

Documents of American Realism and Naturalism PDF Author: Donald Pizer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 502

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Book Description
Donald Pizer presents the major critical discussions of American realism and naturalism from the beginnings of the movement in the 1870s to the present. He includes the most often cited discussions ranging from William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Frank Norris in the late nineteenth century to those by V. L. Parrington, Malcolm Cowley, and Lionel Trilling in the early twentieth century. To provide the full context for the effort to interpret the nature and significance of realism and naturalism during the periods when the movements were live issues on the critical scene, however, he also includes many uncollected essays. His selections since World War II reflect the major recent tendencies in academic criticism of the movements. Through introductions to each of the three sections, Pizer provides background, delineating the underlying issues motivating attempts to attack, defend, or describe American realism and naturalism. In particular, Pizer attempts to reveal the close ties between criticism of the two movements and significant cultural concerns of the period in which the criticism appeared. Before each selection, Pizer provides a brief biographical note and establishes the cultural milieu in which the essay was originally published. He closes his anthology with a bibliography of twentieth-century academic criticism of American realism and naturalism.

Henry James in Context

Henry James in Context PDF Author: David McWhirter
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521514614
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 528

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Book Description
The fullest single volume work of reference on James's life and his interactions with the world around him.

To Build a Fire

To Build a Fire PDF Author: Jack London
Publisher: The Creative Company
ISBN: 9781583415870
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 40

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Book Description
Describes the experiences of a newcomer to the Yukon when he attempts to hike through the snow to reach a mining claim.

The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism

The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism PDF Author: Donald Pizer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521438766
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
This Companion examines a number of issues related to the terms realism and naturalism. The introduction seeks both to discuss the problems in the use of these two terms in relation to late nineteenth-century fiction and to describe the history of previous efforts to make the terms expressive of American writing of this period. The Companion includes ten essays which fall into four categories: essays on the historical context of realism and naturalism by Louis Budd and Richard Lehan; essays on critical approaches to the movements since the early 1970s by Michael Anesko, essays on the efforts to expand the canon of realism and naturalism by Elizabeth Ammons; and a full-scale discussion of ten major texts, from W. D. Howell's The Rise of Silas Lapham to Jack London's The Call of the Wild, by John W. Crowley, Tom Quirk, J. C. Levenson, Blanche Gelfant, Barbara Hochman, and Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin.

Literary Research and the American Realism and Naturalism Period

Literary Research and the American Realism and Naturalism Period PDF Author: Linda L. Stein
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0810861410
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
Literary Research and the American Realism and Naturalism Period: Strategies and Sources will help those interested in researching this era. Authors Linda L. Stein and Peter J. Lehu emphasize research methodology and outline the best practices for the research process, paying attention to the unique challenges inherent in conducting studies of national literature.

Haunting Realities

Haunting Realities PDF Author: Monika Elbert
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817319379
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
An innovative collection of essays examining the sometimes paradoxical alignment of Realism and Naturalism with the Gothic in American literature to highlight their shared qualities Following the golden age of British Gothic in the late eighteenth century, the American Gothic’s pinnacle is often recognized as having taken place during the decades of American Romanticism. However, Haunting Realities explores the period of American Realism—the end of the nineteenth century—to discover evidence of fertile ground for another age of Gothic proliferation. At first glance, “Naturalist Gothic” seems to be a contradiction in terms. While the Gothic is known for its sensational effects, with its emphasis on horror and the supernatural, the doctrines of late nineteenth-century Naturalism attempted to move away from the aesthetics of sentimentality and stressed sobering, mechanistic views of reality steeped in scientific thought and the determinism of market values and biology. Nonetheless, what binds Gothicism and Naturalism together is a vision of shared pessimism and the perception of a fearful, lingering presence that ominously haunts an impending modernity. Indeed, it seems that in many Naturalist works reality is so horrific that it can only be depicted through Gothic tropes that prefigure the alienation and despair of modernism. In recent years, research on the Gothic has flourished, yet there has been no extensive study of the links between the Gothic and Naturalism, particularly those which stem from the early American Realist tradition. Haunting Realities is a timely volume that addresses this gap and is an important addition to scholarly work on both the Gothic and Naturalism in the American literary tradition.

Realism and the Birth of the Modern United States

Realism and the Birth of the Modern United States PDF Author: Stanley Corkin
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820317304
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
This book offers an interdisciplinary view of American culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Using the conventions of historical study, Stanley Corkin draws out the ways in which the works of writers and filmmakers from 1885 to 1925 shaped and were shaped by the business, politics, and social life of the period. Corkin traces the entrance of the United States into the modern age by considering the historical dimension of cinema and literary aesthetics: first of realism, then naturalism, and finally modernism. He begins with the work of writer William Dean Howells and the advent of American cinema under the stewardship of Thomas Edison, arguing that realism was complexly involved in Progressive political and economic reform. Next, analyses of Theodore Dreiser's novel Sister Carrie and the films of the Edison Company's star director, Edwin S. Porter, detail the relationships of naturalism to the increasingly abstract presentation of the material commodity through mass marketing. The study culminates with an examination of the parallels between Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time and the D. W. Griffith film The Birth of a Nation. These two modernist works, Corkin contends, illustrate strategies of expression that attempt to move the material commodity away from its economic base and into a pristine, apolitical realm. These literary and cinematic works both reflect and participate in the economic, political, and social reorganization of American life from the top down. The result, Corkin concludes, is a world in which a conception of a human being is asserted as differing little from that of a machine, a tree, or an animal.

The Problem of American Realism

The Problem of American Realism PDF Author: Michael Davitt Bell
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226042022
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Ever since William Dean Howells declared his "realism war" in the 1880s, literary historians have regarded the rise of "realism" and "naturalism" as the great development in American post-Civil War fiction. Yet there are many problems with this generalization. It is virtually impossible, for example, to extract from the novels and manifestoes of American writers of this period any consistent definitions of realism or naturalism as modes of literary representation. Rather than seek common traits in widely divergent "realist" and "naturalist" literary works, Michael Davitt Bell focuses here on the role that these terms played in the social and literary discourse of the 1880s and 1890s. Bell argues that in America, "realism" and "naturalism" never achieved the sort of theoretical rigor that they did in European literary debate. Instead, the function of these ideas in America was less aesthetic than ideological, promoting as "reality" a version of social normalcy based on radically anti-"literary" and heavily gendered assumptions. What effects, Bell asks, did ideas about realism and naturalism have on writers who embraced and resisted them? To answer this question, he devotes separate chapters to the work of Howells and Frank Norris (the principal American advocates of realism and naturalism in the 1880s and 1890s), Mark Twain, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Sarah Orne Jewett. Bell reveals that a chief function of claiming to be a realist or a naturalist was to provide assurance that one was a "real" man rather than an "effeminate" artist. Since the 1880s, Bell asserts, all serious American fiction writers have had to contend with this problematic conception of literary realism. The true story of the transformation of American fiction after the Civil War is the history of this contention - a history of individual accommodations, evasions, holding actions, and occasional triumphs.