AMERICAN LITERATURE 1865–1914

AN INTRODUCTION

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The Transformation of a Nation• Territorial Expansion and Growth

• Transcontinental Railroad• The frontier “closes” in the 1890s• Expansion beyond the continent

• Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Hawaii• Impact on Native Americans

• Reservations • The Dawes Allotment Act

The Transformation of a Nation• The

transcontinental railroad—completed in 1869—facilitated travel across the United States and contributed to the closing of the frontier.

The Transformation of a Nation• In early California, the railroads

employed thousands of Chinese immigrants to do the toughest work.

The Transformation of a Nation• With the close of the frontier came

an increasing nostalgia for the romance of the “Wild West.”

• Dime novels such as the one pictured here—Kit Carson, Jr., the Crack Shot of the West—packaged this nostalgia for urban readers.

The Transformation of a Nation• “[T]he United States, eager to

compete with European nations, attempted to expand its influence beyond its continental borders, looking to gain the former Spanish possessions of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines following the Spanish-American War in 1898” (NAAL 5).

• This 1896 advertisement for Harper's publicizes journalists’ coverage of the war.

The Transformation of a Nation• San Antonio,

Texas, 1898. Officer's mess of the Rough Riders in San Antonio.

• Seated in the background are Colonel Len Wood and Colonel Roosevelt.

• The Rough Riders famously fought at the Battle of San Juan Hill in Cuba as part of the Spanish-American War.

The Transformation of a Nation• Immigration and growth

• Rapid population growth• 1870 population: 38.5

million• 1910 population: 92

million• 1920 population: 123

million• Most population growth

is from European immigration

• Rural population declines as urban population increases

The Transformation of a Nation

The Transformation of a Nation

The Transformation of a Nation

The Transformation of a Nation

• This is the interior of tenement housing in New York City, ca. 1905–10.

• The dense population of cities such as New York at the turn of the century led to substandard living conditions for new immigrants, recently emancipated African-American migrants from the South, and the urban poor.

The Transformation of a Nation• This photograph of a street toy

vendor in San Francisco's Chinatown, ca. 1900, bears witness to the growing population of Asian immigrants on the West Coast.

The Transformation of a Nation• This W.A. Rogers

editorial cartoon depicts Uncle Sam returning his quota of "assisted" immigrants.

• Images such as this speak to the anxiety that accompanied the mass influx of immigrants to the United States.

The Transformation of a Nation• Industrialization

• The amount of capital invested in manufacturing quadruples between 1850 and 1880

• Monopolies allow a small number of men to control profitable enterprises

• Immigrants (and their children) provide the labor force for the Industrial Era

• A vast disparity in wealth emerges between the very rich and the very poor

The Transformation of a Nation

The Transformation of a Nation

The Transformation of a Nation

The Transformation of a Nation

The Transformation of a Nation

The Transformation of a Nation

The Transformation of a Nation

The Transformation of a Nation

The Literary Marketplace• New character types emerged in

post–Civil War literature:• industrial workers • the rural poor • ambitious business leaders • vagrants • prostitutes and “fallen women”• unheroic soldiers

The Literary Marketplace

• Newspapers and magazines nurtured post–Civil War authors• many writers began their careers as journalists• periodicals published fiction by the major authors of the period• periodicals gave rise to “the literature of argument”

• The idea of the “Great American Novel” emerged soon after the Civil War

Forms of Realism and Naturalism• Realism is the dominant

literary style of the period• William Dean Howells says that

literary realism “is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.”

• Henry James and Edith Wharton focus their literary realism on interior psychological states.

• Mark Twain works within the tradition of vernacular storytelling.

Forms of Realism and Naturalism• Naturalism is a type of

literary realism characterized by the following:• characters from the

fringes of society• human actions shaped by

forces beyond our control (biology, environment, and chance)

• a world that is more random than predictable

• no “happy endings” for characters

Forms of Naturalism and RealismWe must operate with characters, passions, human and social data as the chemist and the physicist work on inert bodies, as the physiologist works on living bodies. Determinism governs everything. It is scientific investigation; it is experimental reasoning that combats one by one the hypotheses of the idealists and will replace novels of pure imagination by novels of observation and experiment. —Émile Zola, “The Experimental Novel”