Regionalism and Local Color Realism and Naturalism

“What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?”

 1883: The Brooklyn Bridge opens  1885: The first skyscraper opens in Chicago  1893: The World’s Columbian Exposition showcases American technology and industry  1898: Spanish-American War  1903: Wright Brothers make first airplane flight  1913: Henry Ford announces the assembly line

 1881: Pasteur develops vaccine for rabies  1885: Benz produces first gasoline-operated car  1895: X-Rays discovered  1899: Aspirin is patented  1905: Einstein formulates theory of relativity  1910: Sigmund Freud publishes Psychoanalytic book  1912: The Titanic sinks  1914: World War I begins

 Population grows by 50%  Endless supply of workers and resources  Westward expansion  Land, farms, ranches, mines  Frontier declared “closed” by consensus (1890)  Where to expand now?  Building cities, forging industrial empires, finding distant international outposts to plant the US flag

 US Army soldiers kill more than 200 Sioux men, women, and children  Native Americans confined on reservations

 Romanticism wilted after Civil War  “Realists” were a reaction to this disillusionment  Focused on everyday life  Ordinary human behavior  “Local Color” writing reflected true-to-life…  Customs  Speech  Character …of people in different regions of the country.

 New inventions  Airplanes, skyscrapers, motion pictures  Corporations grew into monopolies  Controlled wages  Fixed prices  Lack of competition  Concentrated power in the hands of the few  Gap between rich and poor became a canyon

 Relied on emerging sciences of biology, psychology, and sociology  Showed an interest in human motivation/ psychology– interior issues  Realistic settings presenting adversity  Battlefields, lifeboats, slums, cityscapes  Realistic Authors  Henry James  Stephen Crane  Kate Chopin

 Overcrowded cities, social inequalities led to reform  Roosevelt became a “trustbuster” (monopoly regulator)  Labor movement  Hours, working conditions, working conditions  Niagara movement (W.E.B. DuBois)  Female suffrage (Susan B. Anthony)  Landscape and wildlife protection (John Muir)

 Relied on scientific understandings to dissect human behavior  Inspired by Darwin and Freud’s recent theories  Focus on environmental forces that determine human fate  Jack London (Call of the Wild)  Theodore Dreiser (Sister Carrie)

Credit: Artist, Gary R. Lucy.

 Desire to record, celebrate, and mythologize the many different and unique geographical regions  Attention to recording accurately the speech, mannerisms, behavior, and beliefs of people in specific locales  Local color writing “painted” the local scenes and tends toward humorous or sentimental tones

 Mark Twain  Mississippi River  Small river towns  Bret Harte  Gold-mining camps of the West  Western pulp fiction  Gamblers, gunfighters, gold

You will understand… tall tales vernacular writer’s purpose comic devices