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American Realism: A Webliography and E-Anthology

(1865-1900)

Description:

Like all the terms relating to literary movements, the term is
loose and somewhat equivocal. American Realism began as a reaction to and
a rejection of Romanticism, with its emphasis on emotion, imagination, and the
individual. The movement began as early as the 1830’s but reached
prominence and held sway from the end of the Civil War to around the end of the
nineteenth century. The movement was centered in fiction, particularly the
novel. It attempted fidelity to real life, or “actuality,” in
its representation. The realist concerns himself with the here and now,
centering his work in his own time, dealing with common-place everyday events
and people, and with the socio-political climate of his day .

Major Statements:

Samuel Clemens’ (Mark Twain) “Fenimore
Cooper’s Literary Offenses”

William Dean Howell’s Criticism and Fiction (1891)

Henry James “The
Art of Fiction”

Roots of Realism:

Southwest Humorists:

Harris, George Washington, 1814-1869, sketches
Sut
Lovingood: Yarns Spun

Longstreet, Augustus Baldwin,
1790-1870
Georgia Scenes

Thorpe, Thomas Bangs,
1815-1878
The Hive of the Bee
Hunter

Major
Writers
Representative Works

Name & Genres

Samuel Clemens,
fiction
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Life
on the Mississippi

“Fenimore
Cooper’s Literary Offenses”,

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

Bret Harte, short
fiction
Selected
Stories of Bret Harte “The
Outcasts of Poker Flat” “The
Luck

of
Roaring Camp”

Ambrose Bierce,
fiction
Tales of Soldiers and Civilian (1891)

William Dean Howells, fiction,
essays
A Modern Instance (1882), The Rise of Silas Lapham, A Hazard of New

Fortunes

Henry James,
fiction “Daisy
Miller,” Portrait of A Lady, The
American, The Turn of the Screw

Edith Wharton,
fiction
The
House of Mirth, Ethan
Frome, The
Age of Innocence

Kate Chopin,
fiction
The Awakening

George Washington Cable,
fiction
The
Grandissimes , Old
Creole Days

Joel Chandler Harris,
fiction
Uncle Remus
stories

Charles Chestnutt,
fiction
The
Conjure Woman (1899), The
House Behind the Cedars
(1900)

“The
Goophered Grapevine,” “The
Passing of Grandison”

Paul Lawrence Dunbar, poet

Hamlin Garland,
fiction “Under
the Lion’s Paw”

Sarah Orne Jewett,
fiction
A White Heron (1886), “A
White Heron,”

The
Country of the Pointed Firs

(1896)

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman,
fiction
A Humble Romance, A New England Nun and

Common Themes and Elements in Realism

Pragmatism

literature of the common-place

attempts to represent real life

ordinary people–poor and middle class

ordinary speech in dialect–use of vernacular

recent or contemporary life

subject matter presented in an unidealized, unsentimentalized
way

democratic function of literature

social criticism–effect on audience is key

presents indigenous American life

importance of place–regionalism, “local color”

sociology and psychology

Periodicals and Useful Resources:

Atlantic Monthly

The Atlantic Monthly archives

Cady, Edwin H. The Light of Common Day: Realism in American
Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1971.

Chase, Richard. The American Novel and Its Tradition.
Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1957.

Geismar, Maxwell. Rebels and Ancestors: The American Novel,
1890-1915. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953.

Harper’s Weekly

Harper’s Weekly Archive

Harper’s Weekly Online

Harper’s Monthly

Library
of Southern Literature

Literature of Slavery and Freedom

New York Spirit of the Times

Spirit of the Times Database

Spirit of the Times Webpage

North American Review

The North American Review Archives

The
Online Archive of Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women’s Writings

Pizer, Donald, ed. The Cambridge Companion to American
Realism and Naturalism: Howells to London. New York: Cambridge U P,
1995.

Sundquist, Eric, ed. and introd. American Realism: New Essays.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1982.

Trachtenberg, Alan. The Incorporation of America: Culture and
Society in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill and Wang,
1982.

Ziff, Larzer. The American 1890s: Life and Times of a Lost
Generation. New York: Viking, 1966.

Realism in Other Arts:

While realism in Western art was nothing new, as accurate presentation,
nearly photographic, had been practiced as early as the Renaissance, the
“new” realism eschewed any alteration from reality insisting instead
on precise imitation. Subject matter was limited to the modern world and modern
life. As in literature, works centered on the commonplace–lower class
peasants and the urban working class, common people. Winslow Homer once
said of his method, “I paint it exactly as it appears.” French
Realist Gustave Courbet may have said it better, “Everything that does not
appear on the retina is outside the the domain of painting.” Among the
major practioners of American Realism in painting were: Homer, Thomas Eakins,
William Michael Harnett, John Singer Sargent, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler.

Click on the thumbnails below to view a larger image.

Thomas Eakins

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