美国文学4之现代主义

20134211504 132115 高爽90
The Realistic Period in America
Abtract:Realism was a reaction against Romanticism or a move away from the bias
towards romance and self-creating fictions, and paved the way to Modernism.
Key word: Realism Romanticism Modernism.
The period ranging form 1865 to 1914 has been referred to as the Age of Realism in the literary history of the United Sates, which is actually a movement or tendency that dominated the spirit of American literature, especially American fiction, from the 1850s onwards. Realism was a reaction against Romanticism or a move away from the bias towards romance and self-creating fictions, and paved the way to Modernism.
The American society after the Civil War provided rich soil for the rise and development of Realism. The fifty years between the end of the civil War to the outbreak of the First World War is one of the periods in the American history characterized with changes, in relation to every aspect of American life, politically, economically, culturally, and religiously. The scale of the change was so vast that it indicated a fundamental redirection in the nature and ideology of the American society.
The literary scene after the Civil War proved to be quite different a picture. The harsh realities of life as well as the disillusion of heroism resulting from the dark memories of the Civil War had set the nation against the romance. The Americans began to be tired of the sentimental feelings of Romantic ideas in the older generation, came up with a new inspiration. This new attitude was characterized by a great interest in the realities of life. It aimed at the interpretation of the actualities of any aspect of life, free from subjective prejudice, idealism, or romantic color. Instead of thinking about the mysteries of life and death and heroic individualism, people's attention was now directed to the interesting features of everyday existence, to what was brutal or sordid, and to the open portrayal of class struggle, so writers who could describe the integrity of human character reacting under various circumstances and authors who could picture the pioneers of the Far West, the new immigrants and the struggles of the working classes began to gain the favor of the reading public. This literary interest in the so-called "reality" of life started a new period in the American literary writings known as the Age of Realism.
Their emphasis on the fidelistic reflection of human reality is most clearly expressed by William Dean Howells when he said in Criticism and Fiction (1891) that "I confess I do not care to judge any work of the imagination without first applying this test to it. We must ask ourselves before anything else, is it true? - True to the motives, the impulses, the principles that shape the life of actual men and women?" Guided by this principle of adhering to the truthful treatment of life, the realists touched upon various contemporary social and political issues. In their works, instead of writing about the polite, well-dressed, grammatically correct middle-class young people who moved in exotic places and remote times, they introduced industrial workers and farmers, ambitious businessmen and vagrants, prostitutes and unheroic soldiers as major characters in fiction. They approached the harsh realities and pressures in the post Civil War society either by a comprehensive picture of modern life in its various occupations, class stratifications and manners, or by a psychological exploration of man's subconsciousness.。