A Brief Summary of the History of American Literature（四）

Naturalism is a more deliberate kind of realism, usually involves a view of human beings as a passive victims of natural forces and social environment. The most significant work of naturalism in English is Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900).

3.2 Representative writers and their works

Mark Twain [pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910) was an American humorist, lecturer, essayist, and author. His primary works are The Innocents Abroad, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur?s Court.

Mark Twain was the true father of American literature. He intentionally deviates from classical genteel and tends to use local dialects, colloquial language, even Black English, slang, clipped structures and ungrammatical sentences. He was a combination of realism with romanticism. His works combine American folk humor and serious literature, characterize a local culture, elements such as speech, customs, and more peculiar to one particular place. The physical settings, and people’s behavior and thoughts are different from the other places.

William Dean Howells （1837-1920）was born in a small town in Ohio and brought up in the humble surroundings of the rough-and-ready American Midwest. He had little education but was widely read.

Stephen Crane (1871-1900) was born into a New Jersey Methodist clergyman’s family. It is no exaggeration to state that Crane anticipated the chief phenomena of American literature in the first few decades of 20th-century. Crane’s best short stories include “Open Boat,” “The Blue Hotel,” and “An Experiment in Misery,” all reinforcing the basic Crane motif of environment and heredity overwhelming man.

Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) has been a controversial figure in American literary history. The revival of naturalism in the 1930s enthroned Dreiser as the guide and pioneer for the latter-day naturalists such as James T. Farrell, John O’ Hara, for it is in Dreiser’s works that American naturalism is said to have come of age.

There are many other great writers in this period, such as Edwin Arlington Robinson, Jack London, O. Henry, and so on. They have made great contribution to the world’s literature.

4. The Age of Modernism

4.1. Characteristics of Modernism

The large cultural wave of Modernism, which emerged in Europe, and then spread to the United States in the early years of the 20th century, expressed a sense of modern life through art as a sharp break from the past. As modern machinery had changed the pace, atmosphere, and appearance of daily life in the early 20th century, so many artists and writers, with varying degrees of success, reinvented traditional artistic forms and tried to find radically new ones—an aesthetic echo of what people had come to call “the machine age.”

American drama imitated English and European theater until well into the 20th century. Not until the 20th century would serious American plays attempt aesthetic innovation.