american literature 1865-1914 overview
TRANSCRIPT
AMERICAN LITERATURE 1865–1914
AN INTRODUCTION
English 245
The Transformation of a Nation• Territorial Expansion and Growth
• Transcontinental Railroad• The frontier “closes” in the 1890s• Expansion beyond the continent
• Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Hawaii• Impact on Native Americans
• Reservations • The Dawes Allotment Act
The Transformation of a Nation• The
transcontinental railroad—completed in 1869—facilitated travel across the United States and contributed to the closing of the frontier.
The Transformation of a Nation• In early California, the railroads
employed thousands of Chinese immigrants to do the toughest work.
The Transformation of a Nation• With the close of the frontier came
an increasing nostalgia for the romance of the “Wild West.”
• Dime novels such as the one pictured here—Kit Carson, Jr., the Crack Shot of the West—packaged this nostalgia for urban readers.
The Transformation of a Nation• “[T]he United States, eager to
compete with European nations, attempted to expand its influence beyond its continental borders, looking to gain the former Spanish possessions of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines following the Spanish-American War in 1898” (NAAL 5).
• This 1896 advertisement for Harper's publicizes journalists’ coverage of the war.
The Transformation of a Nation• San Antonio,
Texas, 1898. Officer's mess of the Rough Riders in San Antonio.
• Seated in the background are Colonel Len Wood and Colonel Roosevelt.
• The Rough Riders famously fought at the Battle of San Juan Hill in Cuba as part of the Spanish-American War.
The Transformation of a Nation• Immigration and growth
• Rapid population growth• 1870 population: 38.5
million• 1910 population: 92
million• 1920 population: 123
million• Most population growth
is from European immigration
• Rural population declines as urban population increases
The Transformation of a Nation
The Transformation of a Nation
The Transformation of a Nation
The Transformation of a Nation
• This is the interior of tenement housing in New York City, ca. 1905–10.
• The dense population of cities such as New York at the turn of the century led to substandard living conditions for new immigrants, recently emancipated African-American migrants from the South, and the urban poor.
The Transformation of a Nation• This photograph of a street toy
vendor in San Francisco's Chinatown, ca. 1900, bears witness to the growing population of Asian immigrants on the West Coast.
The Transformation of a Nation• This W.A. Rogers
editorial cartoon depicts Uncle Sam returning his quota of "assisted" immigrants.
• Images such as this speak to the anxiety that accompanied the mass influx of immigrants to the United States.
The Transformation of a Nation• Industrialization
• The amount of capital invested in manufacturing quadruples between 1850 and 1880
• Monopolies allow a small number of men to control profitable enterprises
• Immigrants (and their children) provide the labor force for the Industrial Era
• A vast disparity in wealth emerges between the very rich and the very poor
The Transformation of a Nation
The Transformation of a Nation
The Transformation of a Nation
The Transformation of a Nation
The Transformation of a Nation
The Transformation of a Nation
The Transformation of a Nation
The Transformation of a Nation
The Literary Marketplace• New character types emerged in
post–Civil War literature:• industrial workers • the rural poor • ambitious business leaders • vagrants • prostitutes and “fallen women”• unheroic soldiers
The Literary Marketplace
• Newspapers and magazines nurtured post–Civil War authors• many writers began their careers as journalists• periodicals published fiction by the major authors of the period• periodicals gave rise to “the literature of argument”
• The idea of the “Great American Novel” emerged soon after the Civil War
Forms of Realism and Naturalism• Realism is the dominant
literary style of the period• William Dean Howells says that
literary realism “is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.”
• Henry James and Edith Wharton focus their literary realism on interior psychological states.
• Mark Twain works within the tradition of vernacular storytelling.
Forms of Realism and Naturalism• Naturalism is a type of
literary realism characterized by the following:• characters from the
fringes of society• human actions shaped by
forces beyond our control (biology, environment, and chance)
• a world that is more random than predictable
• no “happy endings” for characters
Forms of Naturalism and RealismWe must operate with characters, passions, human and social data as the chemist and the physicist work on inert bodies, as the physiologist works on living bodies. Determinism governs everything. It is scientific investigation; it is experimental reasoning that combats one by one the hypotheses of the idealists and will replace novels of pure imagination by novels of observation and experiment. —Émile Zola, “The Experimental Novel”