America Realism 英语专业教学课件.pptVIP

American Realism (1860s—1880s) Term: Realism aimed at the interpretation of th 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. * * Historical Background: 1. the Civil War (1861—1864): “The industrial North had triumphed over the agrarian South, and from that victory came a society based on mass labor and mass consumption.” 2. “The Gilded Age”: “an age of extremes”— “of decline and progress, of poverty and dazzling wealth, of gloom and buoyant hope”. 3.the railroad: It changed the way in which people lived and worked. General Realism: 1. Realism originated in France as reálisme. It called for “reality and truth” in the depiction of ordinary life. Realism: “nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.” (W.D. Howells) 4. Some representatives are: Zola, Flaubert, Balzac and Dostoyevsky. 5. Review the realism in English literature Definition and features in America: Time: the latter half if ht 19th century, (1870s--1880s) Features: a. verisimilitude of details derived from observation b. representative in plot, setting and character c. an objective rather than an idealized view of human experience Theme: the world of experience of the commonplace and the familiar and the low. Style: genteel , graceful prose ( Howells and Henry James) plain and rough ( Mark Twain) local color writers Representative writers: 1.William Dean Howells (1837—1920), The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and Criticism and Fiction. 2.Henry James (1843—1916), Daisy Miller (1878), The Ambassadors (1903), The Wings of the Dove (1902) and The Art of Fiction. 3.Mark Twain (1835—1910), The A