English 233 - American Literature from 1865 to 1914

Dean Flower

MW 1-2:30

 

 

After the Civil War it seemed that American literature lost its romance—its tendency toward allegory and symbolism (ravens, whales, scarlet letters), its fruitful quarrel with the Emersonian sublime. That “visionary gleam” faded into the light of common day—making way for vernacular humor (Mark Twain), a more prosaic realism (Howells), a more unbuttoned frankness about sexuality (Walt Whitman), a new documentary impulse (“local color” stories), more complex psychological studies (Henry James), and a new attention to women by women writers (Kate Chopin, Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, Mary Wilkins, Charlotte Perkins Gilman). By the 1890s realism had become naturalism, a post-Darwinian view of the world as determined by amoral and indifferent forces, not by any deities other than basic human cravings and ruthless social processes. Yet writers like Dreiser, Crane, and E. A. Robinson continued to find inspiration in even the bleakest of such nihilistic visions.

  Probable texts:

 

Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. C 1865-1914

Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (Penguin, original text)

Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs (Anchor)

E. A. Robinson, Selected Poems (Penguin)

Gertrude Stein, Three Lives ( Dover )