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SOURCE: Berthoff, Warner. “American Realism: A Grammar of Motives.” In The Ferment of Realism: American Literature, 1884-1919, pp. 1-47. New York: The Free Press, 1965.
In the following essay, Berthoff discusses the establishment of realism as the dominant mode of literary expression of the 1880s and 1890s and attempts to categorize the elements that comprise a realist work.
The Emergence of “realism”
The great collective event in American letters during the 1880s and 1890s was the securing of “realism” as the dominant standard of value. But, as the postulations preceding this chapter suggest, it was a peculiarly indefinite standard. One can more readily say what kinds of writing the new American realists were in revolt against than what exactly they wanted to create. In the way of causes and movements in the United States, the cause of realism appears more exclusively a summons to some broad preliminary moral reformation...
This section contains 14,811 words (approx. 50 pages at 300 words per page) |