1.1: American Literature 1865-Present Overview

The Gilded Age

• Many historians follow the lead of Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in referring to the late nineteenth century in America as "the Gilded Age"—a time of greed, corruption, and get-rich-quick schemes.
• Literature from this period values descriptive and documentary writing that scrutinizes the demographic, economic, and social changes taking place in the nation.
• A focus on realism in the writing of Twain, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Edith Wharton, and Theodore Dreiser has led to a focus on literature produced in the nation's urban centers. These works reveal anxiety about immigration, racial equality and racial violence, shifting gender roles, and the concentration of wealth.

Reconstructing America

• The Civil War left approximately 2 percent of the total population of the United States dead. Rebuilding after this war required the land and mineral resources of the West as well as the labor of immigrant populations. Many northern entrepreneurs found economic opportunity in the South.
• The use of the railroad to transport food and other goods concentrated economic power in the hands of large corporations. Family farms were displaced by large-scale agriculture, and many farmers moved to the swelling cities.
• Cities grew rapidly in the nineteenth century, and urban workers suffered in dangerous work environments. Government officials condoned and even profited from the oppression of blue-collar workers.
• Urbanization and industrialization prompted new waves of immigration from eastern Europe and other regions. Individuals born in the United States worried that this influx of immigrants would damage the nation.
• White Americans also considered Native Americans a threat. Appropriating their land, government officials forced Native nations to live on specific reservations of land. Native writers like Zitkala-Sa, Francis LaFlesche, and John Milton Oskinson decried efforts to assimilate Native Americans into white culture.
• In the South, African Americans were abandoned to the abuse of Southern Democrats as part of a political agreement made during the 1877 presidential election. In both the South and the North, African Americans saw their rights won and progress made during the Civil War erode.

The Literary Marketplace

• Many antebellum writers, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Walt Whitman, continued to be influential in the 1880s and 1890s.
• Authors witnessed several innovations in the literary marketplace: the establishment of bestseller lists, the standardization of book reviews, and the refinement of copyright law. The proliferation of print encouraged the rise of literary celebrities; the actions of Twain, Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein were regularly reported in the newspaper.
• Lending libraries, magazines, and the serialization of novels brought literature to middle-class readers.

Forms of Realism

• The term "realism" refers to a movement documenting the speech and manners of a wide variety of people in English, European, and American literature. Most realist fiction focused on the observable surfaces of the world in which fictional characters lived, and strove to make those surfaces seem lifelike to readers.
• Critics who favored dramatic storytelling accused realist writers of dullness. But William Dean Howells championed the writing of realist authors such as James, Twain, Crane, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Charles Chesnutt.
• Regional writing by writers like Constance Fenimore Wilson, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary Wilkins Freeman, which focused on the natural, social, and linguistic features of a given place, flourished during the late nineteenth century.
• Regional writing and literary realism often focused on the lives of ethnic "others." Authors depicted black characters speaking in the vernacular. The use of dialect often marked the social differences of class for readers.
• Across the country, social scientists worked to document the peculiar language and customs of individual groups of people.
• Authors wrote polemic condemnations of Civil War violence and the failures of Reconstruction.

The Woman Question

• Women fought for greater autonomy and for civil rights during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Changes to divorces laws fueled new debates about the institution of marriage.
• Women's clubs both magnified the voices of women advocating for social change and also reified the existing social order, reinforcing divisions of race, class, and religion.
• Advocates for suffrage were disappointed that the fifteenth amendment—extending African American men the right to vote—did not include language supporting women's right to vote, which would be granted only by passage of the nineteenth amendment, in 1919.
• Stories such as Daisy Miller and "The Yellow Wall-paper," along with novels like The Awakening and Sister Carrie featured female protagonists seeking autonomy and the fulfillment of their own desires.

Unseen Forces

• Scientific breakthroughs created a sense of uncertainty; electricity made the impossible seem real, as citizens of the United States used telephones and telegraphs for the first time, heard word of X-rays, and saw the first automobiles in their streets.
• Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection became increasingly popular, and the philosopher Herbert Spencer argued in the 1860s that the same forces shaped competition among groups of people. Many thought of capitalism as a law of nature designed to eliminate the economically unfit.
• Darwinism justified racial prejudice and violence. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibited immigration from China, and many African American men were lynched by white supremacists who characterized racial violence as the fulfillment of natural laws.
• Like realism, naturalism focused on social conflict, but naturalist writers emphasized the violence that characterized social interactions at the turn of the century; they especially focused on the lives of low-income people, who were more vulnerable than the well-to-do.
• Naturalist novels emphasized masculine violence. These violent narratives countered a popular anxiety over the feminization of American men.

The New American Empire

• Advocates of muscular Christianity, such as Teddy Roosevelt, attempted to shape the physical and moral development of American men through the Young Men's Christian Association and other institutions.
• Roosevelt gained notoriety during the Spanish-American War, leading the American invasion of Cuba. The United States also acquired territory in the Philippines and Puerto Rico.
• Filipino forces resisted the United States military, and many writers condemned American imperialism.
• The nation's entrance into World War I in 1917 confirmed the country's arrival as a global power. The war also signaled the arrival of modernism, as Americans struggled to cope with the cognitive shock of life in an increasingly unpredictable world.