3-Realism and naturalism (the beginning of the 20

th

century)

Local colour is a realist fiction, but local colour deals with the specific characteristic of a particular group. The colour fiction still keeps some characteristics of the romance and the romantic fiction. American realism grew out of local colour literature by irtue of its greater sophistication. !t yielded in time to the mo ement know as naturalism (the concept of determinism). This is too simplistic a statement because there are writers that are difficult to classify (for e"ample# $ark Twain%a local colourist and a realism writer at the same time, &enry 'ames%realism). ( en )rancis $arian *rawford, who wrote thirty%odd no els about +,th century -enice (medie al times that inspire romantic writers) and tried a kind of neo%romantic re i al, wrote about the corruptions of the .ilded Age. /riters ha e different kinds of writing. 0ealism is a label that helps isolate certain features that were common to a great deal of fiction written in the last third of the +1th century. )or /illiam 2ean &owells the life of common people was worth transcribing accurately. &e wrote about the life of common people. !n contrast with romance, realism insisted on daily life e"planations of cause and effect, and in this point of iew showed its kinship with the ascendant empiricism of nineteenth%century science. 3eople want to see their own e"perience in fiction. 3eople are going to demand an illustration of their own e"periences and life. They want to read real situations and e"periences. This demand is imposed by the big change in American society. America was altering with enormous rapidity. 3opulation grew 4uickly. Towns appeared o ernight and grew to cities within a decade. !t5s a time of ast industrial enterprises (*arnegies, -ander ilt, 0ockefeller, etc...) !mmigration from central and (astern (urope grew. The rapidity of change led to look for e"planations and panaceas. 6topian no els like (dward 7ellamy5s Looking Backwards 2000%+889. 6topian no els describe the perfect society and the perfect way of li ing. This subgenre became ery famous by the end of the +1th century. 2arwin5s theory of e olution, popularised by &erbert :pencer, made an e"traordinary impact on the general public and influenced writers such as &amlin .arland (in Main Travelled Roads +81+, he tries to demolish the 'effersonian myth of agrarian irtue). 2arwin pro ided a biological analogy for the struggle for sur i al within the social world. 2arwin5s affirmed human beings belong to other species, and we de eloped though the time. That comes out with the idea that the strongest one will adapt to the society and will succeed in there. 2arwin5s theory became attracti e for fiction, and they used it to describe how life was like in cities, and the life conditions they had. They use characters who were ictims of society and they had a ery sad end, usually they died by the end of the story because of their hard conditions of life and their many problems. :cience transformed the intellectual as well as the physical life of the nation (technology that produced bridges and skyscrapers) and this appealed to America5s utilitarian temper. :cience influence culture and intellectual life (writing and literature) ;aturalism had both nati e and foreign sources. The *i il /ar had gi en undeniable testimony that life was a mortal struggle, and the price of progress was spilled blood. The rapacious laisse<%faire capitalism that flourished after the war called forth defensi e appeals to ine itability. There was a time of growth but at the same time they had a capitalist system, where not all men had the same opportunity (capitalism didn5t ha e any rules)