AMERICAN LITERATURE 1865-1914

Reconstruction (1865-77) 1869: completion of Union Pacific: the first transcontinental r

ailroad 1882: the mass immigration from Eastern and Southern Euro

pe began 1891: electric trolleys replace horse-driven mass transit 1889: Edison invents the motion picture camera The Gilded Age (1873-1900) Race Riot in North Carolina (1898); Atlanta (1906) 1898: Hawaii 1880-90: industrial revolution 1898: Spanish-American War: (the Philippine Islands)

Between 1865 and 1914, the United States transformed from a country just emerging from a destructive civil war to an imperial nation with overseas possessions and coasts on both the Atlantic and Pacific.

America was transformed from a rural, agrarian, primarily Protestant country before the Civil War into an industrialized world power by the start of World War I.

population During that same time period, a population

explosion occurred, with 25 million immigrants entering the country and many of them, along with Americans from the eastern states, pushing into western America, displacing native American and Spanish communities, and taxing natural resources.

Industrialization of America Despite the massive suffering of the Civil War, the

war effort brought about technological innovations: the first transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869; coal, gold, and silver mines opened; steel cities flourished; the telephone revolutionized communication; and agricultural productivity increased.

The industrialization of America also brought about the rise of economic magnates, such as Leland Stanford and J. P. Morgan.

Problems Problems abounded for small farmers during this

time, with the advent of large-scale farming and landlords who wanted to seize property.

In many U.S. cities, there was a surplus of laborerers, which resulted in low wages. In addition, working conditions were often dangerous.

In response to these issues, the first unions, including the American Federation of Labor, arose in the 1880s.

The literature of this period appears in the context of the dramatic diversification of American experience, both ethnic and regional, and the small but insistent movement among authors to combat the social inequities arising from too-rapid growth.

realism To face the challenge of representing these dy

namic cultural changes, American authors turned to the international aesthetic of realism, which was an attempt to accurately represent life as authors saw it through concrete descriptive details that readers would recognize from their own lives.

naturalism A distinct aesthetic response to the late ninete

enth century, American naturalism continued the realist attempt to represent new and unfamiliar types of characters, but naturalists concentrated on lower-class, marginalized people and merged the realist attention to detail with a strong belief in social determinism rather than free will.

Another crucial development of realism was regional, or “local color,” writing, an attempt to capture distinct language, perspectives, and geographical settings before industrialization and cultural homogenization erased them.

Reference http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/na

al7/contents/C/welcome.asp