American Literature 1865-1914 Overview
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The document provides an overview of the transformation of America between 1865-1914 through territorial expansion, industrialization, immigration, and urbanization. It discusses how the closing of the frontier, completion of the transcontinental railroad, Spanish-American War, and influx of immigrants shaped American society and culture during this period. Literature of this era reflected these changes through the emergence of realism and naturalism as dominant styles focused on accurate depictions of contemporary social issues and human behavior governed by external forces.
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American Literature 1865-1914 Overview
- 2. 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
- 3. The Transform ation of a Nation • The transcontinental railroad— completed in 1869—facilitated travel across the United States and contributed to the closing of the frontier.
- 4. The Transformation of a Nation • In early California, the railroads employed thousands of Chinese immigrants to do the toughest work.
- 5. 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.
- 6. 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.
- 7. 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.
- 8. 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
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- 12. 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.
- 13. 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.
- 14. The Transform ation 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.
- 15. 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
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- 24. 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
- 25. 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
- 26. 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.
- 27. 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
- 28. Forms of Naturalism and Realism We 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”
Hinweis der Redaktion
- Following the Civil War, “White Americans, mostly of English, Scottish, German, and French descent, settled across [the West], increasing the pace by which the U.S. government was forcibly relocating Native American tribes . . . From their homelands to places further west, and attempting to force Hispanic Americans south of the new border with Mexico. As these settlers moved into the extensive terrain west of the Mississippi River, they leveled vast stands of timber, exterminated the buffalo and other wild game in favor of cattle and sheep, and established farms, villages, cities, and the railroads that linked them to markets in the Midwest and East” (NAAL 3). In 1869 the first transcontinental railroad was completed, making it “possible to cross the country quickly and inexpensively” (NAAL 4). According to the 1890 census, there was “no place in the United States with fewer than two people per square mile” (NAAL 5). The historian Frederick Jackson Turner used this statistic to argue that the American frontier was officially “closed.” The closing of the frontier led many Americans to look elsewhere for expansion and growth, such as Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Hawaii. While U.S. territorial claims were growing across the continent and across the globe, Native Americans continued to lose their claims to the land. The outgrowth of the policies of Indian Removal from the 1830s put Native tribes on increasingly diminishing tracts of land in reservations across the United States. In 1887 the Dawes Allotment Act—which divided tribally held land into individually owned parcels—resulted in even more loss of Native land as individual tribe members sold their plots of land in business deals that were either poorly thought out or outright fraudulent. The Dawes Act “reduced the Native land base by some 90 million acres” (NAAL 7).
- The transcontinental railroad—completed in 1869—facilitated travel across the United States and contributed to the closing of the frontier. This is an image of celebrating the first train over the golden spike that completed the Transcontinental Railway. Northern Pacific Railway, St. Paul, Minnesota, to Portland, Oregon, 1890s.
- In early California, the railroads employed thousands of Chinese immigrants to do the toughest work.
- 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.
- “[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.
- 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 statistics for population growth in the postbellum United States are staggering, with the exponential growth coming largely from immigrants from “southern and eastern Europe: Russia, Poland, Italy, and the Balkan nations” (NAAL 6). Whereas prior to the Civil War the majority of the U.S. population was centered in rural areas, following the Civil War most Americans lived in cities such as New York and Chicago. “New York grew from half a million to nearly 3.5 million between 1865 and the turn of the twentieth century. Chicago, with a population of only 29,000 in 1850, had more than 2 million inhabitants by 1910” (NAAL 6).
- This undated photograph of an Italian mother with her three children after their arrival on the Ellis Island immigration station—which opened in 1890—represents the common immigrant experience for Europeans in the late nineteenth century. “From 1892 to 1954, New York’s Ellis Island was the gateway for millions of immigrants to the United States” (NAAL 5).
- Ellis Island welcomed European immigrants on the East Coast, and Angel Island, California, welcomed Asian immigrants on the West Coast. Pictured here are immigration officials examining Japanese immigrants aboard the ship Shimyo Maru. Angel Island, California, 1931.
- This is an image of Mulberry Street in New York City, ca. 1900. Mulberry Street was part of the infamous Five Points district, an area of Manhattan with high population density and the attendant ills that come with it: disease, crime, murder, unemployment, prostitution, and so on. It was also an area of intercultural contact as European immigrants—including the despised Irish—rubbed shoulders with newly freed African Americans.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- “Between 1850 and 1880, capital invested in manufacturing more than quadrupled and factory employment nearly doubled . . . Major industries were consolidated into monopolies, allowing a small number of men to control such enormously profitable enterprises as steel, oil, railroads, meatpacking, banking, and finance, among them Jay Gould, Jim Hill, Leland Stanford, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller. Called ‘robber barons’ by some and celebrated as captains of industry by others, these men squeezed out competitors and accumulated vast wealth and power. The new millionaires formed a wealthy class whose style of life, reported on in the mass media, offered a startling contrast to the lives of ordinary people” (NAAL 6). “Industrial workers had little political leverage before the 1880s, when the American Federation of Labor emerged as the first unified voice of workers. But not until collective bargaining legislation was enacted in the 1930s did labor acquire the right to strike” (NAAL 7).
- Highland Park, Michigan, ca. 1913. Factory workers at the Ford Motor Company plant assemble a Model T automobile. The assembly line would dramatically speed up the production process for American manufacturing, but it would require a tremendous investment of human labor.
- Men and women sew busily in a New York City sweatshop on Ridge Street. Immigrants and newcomers to the city often worked in situations like this, where jobs were plentiful and wages were poor. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, 1908.
- Young boys working at midnight at Indiana Glassworks. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, 1909. The National Child Labor Committee, an organization whose goal was to end child labor, was formed in 1904, but it was not until 1938 that the Fair Labor Standards Act put an end to child labor in the United States.
- J.J. Favogrand Packing Company, Baltimore, Maryland. A very young boy carries loads of cans at a food packing plant in Baltimore. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, 1909.
- Scotland Neck, Halifax County, North Carolina. Eleven-year-old Nannie Coleson sewing stockings at Crescent Hosiery, work for which she makes three dollars a week. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, 1914.
- North Pownal, Vermont. A young girl works as a spinner on the huge machines at a cotton mill in Vermont. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, 1910.
- View from the southwest of Cornelius Vanderbilt's residence, ca. 1894. William Vanderbilt, who made his fortune in the shipping and railroad industry, had three mansions built on the block between 51st and 52nd streets in New York City.
- Smart society yachting parties using one side of the 26th Street pier are contrasted with the criminals, sick, and indigent embarking on the other side for Randall's, Hart's, Ward's, and Blackwell's Islands in the East River. Colored wood engraving, 1891, after a drawing by Thur de Thulstrup. Such juxtapositions became increasingly common in big cities like New York as the disparity between the rich and the poor grew exponentially.
- “New themes, new forms, new subjects, new regions, new authors, and new audiences all emerged in the half century following the Civil War. In fiction, characters rarely represented before the Civil War became familiar figures: industrial workers and the rural poor, ambitious business leaders and vagrants, prostitutes and unheroic soldiers. Women from many social groups, African Americans, Native Americans, ethnic minorities, immigrants: all wrote for publication, and a rapidly burgeoning market for printed works helped establish authorship as a possible career for many” (NAAL 7).
- “Many of the noted authors of the period started as newspaper journalists: Abraham Cahan, Ambrose Bierce, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Sui Sin Far, Joel Chandler Harris, William Dean Howells, Frank Norris, and Mark Twain among them” (NAAL 8). New York and Boston magazines “published works by Kate Chopin, Sarah Orne Jewett, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Charles Chesnutt, Sui Sin Far, Zitkala Ša, and Mark Twain” (NAAL 8). California magazines ”published Bret Harte, Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, Mary Austin, Sui Sin Far, and Mark Twain among others” (NAAL 8). “Periodicals also contributed to the emergence of what the critic Warner Berthoff has called ‘the literature of argument’—writings in sociology, philosophy, and psychology impelled by the spirit of exposure and reform” (NAAL 8). “Developments in the literary marketplace and in the nation’s preoccupations had the effect of greatly enhancing the reputation of prose fiction—the idea of a ‘great’ American novel was first enunciated soon after the Civil War” (NAAL 9).
- Literary realism is the dominant style of the period, but “realism” meant different things to different writers. Discuss with your students Howells’s desire to report “just the facts,” much like a newspaper journalist would, in his fiction. Contrast Howells’s desire to accurately depict surface detail with the opposite tendency in James and Wharton to probe the interior mental states of their characters: for James and Wharton, realism is all about accurately depicting the emotional and moral dilemmas of upper-class characters. Unlike James and Wharton, Twain was more interested in working-class, rural characters than he was the urban elite. He also located realism in the language patterns of his characters, drawing upon a long tradition of vernacular storytelling that attempted to recreate the speech patterns of everyday people. Twain’s style of realism is often characterized as “regional” or “local color” (see NAAL 13–15).
- “Naturalism can be thought of as a version of realism, or as an alternative to it. Literary naturalists, unlike the realists for whom human beings defined themselves within recognizable settings, wrote about human life as it was shaped by forces beyond human control. For them, their view was truly realistic, while Howellsian realism was a form of prettifying. Naturalism introduces characters from the fringes and depths of society, far from the middle class, whose lives really do spin out of control; their fates are seen to be the outcome of degenerate heredity, a sordid environment, and the bad luck that can often seem to control the lives of people without money or influence” (NAAL 10).
- The quotation on this slide comes from an essay titled “The Experimental Novel” (1880), which was written by French theorist and novelist Émile Zola. Statements such as these influenced American realist and naturalist writers. Discuss with your students the implications of this idea that a novel can function as a “scientific investigation” of human behavior. Do they agree or disagree that this is even possible to do? If they agree, can they think of novels that are more “scientific” than others?