Trans-Atlantic Realism

Realism and naturalism were aesthetic movements that emerged in American fiction between approximately 1865 and 1925. This course examines these two literary movements to show how writers of this era explored the trauma created by war (the Civil War and WWI), the moral consequences of freedom and sexual awareness, rapid urbanization and the Great Northern migration, inconsistencies between wealth and poverty, and innovative discoveries in science and technology. The purpose of this course, then, is to investigate how the authors of this period practiced their art both collectively and individually and the ways in which American social life informed the ideologies of realism and naturalism. Possible writers we will study include William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Kate Chopin, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Henry James, and Paul Laurence Dunbar.