Seminar 8

AMERICAN
LITERATURE
AFTER THE
CIVIL WAR
Oleksandra Shulga
Most of the famous literature from after the
Civil War is called Realism. These writers turned
away from Romanticism. The immense cost of
life from the Civil War disillusioned Americans
from their early 1800's idealism. Their plan was
to portray life realistically (hence the name),
and people as they were.
Changes in American
literature after civil war

Regionalism was the most significant literary mode after

the Civil War, fueled by an explosion in magazine
publication, postwar curiosity about the different parts
of the United States, and a sense of nostalgia for a rural
past that always already seemed to be slipping away. In
regionalist texts, setting is central.
The devastation of the Civil War seriously challenged the
faith in the power of sympathy, family, and God that
undergirded sentimentalism as well as the romantic
optimism that powered transcendentalism and the
antebellum reform movements. These literary modes never
really disappeared—Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women
(1868), for example, drew on all three—but the rapid
changes occurring in American life seemed to many to
necessitate new forms of literary expression.
 The postbellum period saw the first publication of the
poems of Emily Dickinson, a poet who, like Whitman,
would fundamentally reshape American verse.
Dickinson was little known in her own lifetime—only
seven of her poems had been published, and these
anonymously. (A more extensive collection of her
poems appeared in 1890.) Her nearly 1800 surviving
lyric poems frequently confront death, but she was
also interested in nature, spirituality, and everyday life.
Her poems are usually composed of alternating lines
of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, the meter
of nursery rhymes and many hymns. But though she
wrote in meter, Dickinson wasn’t afraid to break the
rules, building in pauses through her extensive use of

POETRY dashes, writing in fragments and enjambed lines, and

repeatedly using slant rhyme.
WRITERS OF COLOR AT THE TURN OF THE
CENTURY
The changing literary marketplace, especially the rise of regionalism, and the end of slavery
offered new opportunities for black writers in America, like Charles Chesnutt, discussed above.
During this period, Zitkala-Sa also became the first Native American writer to be embraced by the
literary establishment, having her work published in the prestigious Atlantic Monthly.
The two best-known black writers and leaders in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
were Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. Washington’s most famous work, Up from
Slavery(1900), offers an autobiographical account of Washington’s experience of slavery, with
special focus on his thirst for literacy, as well as his rise to social power after emancipation.
Washington was a proponent of an assimilationist philosophy, urging black Americans to “cast
down [their] buckets where [they] are” and to work slowly toward social and economic equality
with whites. As such, he advocated vocational training for African Americans. W.E.B. Du Bois was
strongly opposed to Washington’s views, especially his willingness to accept limited intellectual
opportunities for blacks. His most famous work, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), took aim at
Washington’s politics, offering a sociological view of the life of poor African Americans in the
South mingled with fiction and personal narratives. The book introduces the idea of “double-
consciousness,” Du Bois’s term for the conflicting experience of African Americans as both
Americans and black people.
Thank you for
your time