Variations and DeparturesVariations and Departures1870-19151870-1915

Authors:Authors:

•Walt WhitmanWalt Whitman

•Emily DickinsonEmily Dickinson

•Mark TwainMark Twain

•Ambrose BierceAmbrose Bierce

var·i·a·tion   (vâr'ē-ā'shən, vār'-) :

Marked difference or deviation from the normal or recognized form, function, or structure.

de·par·ture

divergence or deviation, as from a standard, rule, etc.

(di-'pär-ch&r):

Variations and DeparturesVariations and Departures1870-19151870-1915

What’s going on?The North has won the civil war, the slaves

are freed, the South is impoverished, and the president was assassinated.

Things are not going so well.Mark Twain wrote:

“The eight years in America from 1860 to 1868 uprooted institutions that were centuries old, changed the politics of a people, transformed the social life of half the country, and wrought so profoundly upon the entire national character that the influence cannot be measured.”

In other words, the civil war left America a changed nation.

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Between 1870 and 1915 America did experience explosive growth.

Symbolic of this growth was the development of the railroad.

The 35,000 miles of track in 1965 had increased to about 200,000 miles by the end of the century.

In 1869 the Union Pacific Railroad which, in effect, linked America from the Atlantic to the Pacific ocean, was completed.

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In his writing “Passage to India,” Walt Whitman called for a spiritual achievement to parallel the amazing engineering achievements of the age—and he had good reason!

This period was a time of plunder and exploitation, of

greedy materialism and political corruption, of financial piracy

and labor strife.

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Great fortunes were accumulated while some people went hungry in the growing cities.

Immigrants from Europe poured into the United States in search of fortune, but most found themselves laboring on railroads or in sweatshop factories for low wages.

Magazine and book publishing flourished with the growth of a prosperous, literate middle

class, who thirsted for practical information and for fiction representing “real life.”

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Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Emily Dickinson departed from

previous themes, contents, forms, and use of language

Why is this time period called “Variations and Departures?”

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Three Literary GIANTS!

•Walt Whitman

•Emily Dickinson

•Mark Twain

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Walt Whitman:--Self-proclaimed “poet of America”--invented free verse--used bold images and

symbols taken from everyday life

--tried to capture the truth of the American experience

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Emily Dickinson:--discovered ideas for her poetry

from the garden next to her house

--also found ideas in the small events of her

household work--used slant rhymes and

bizarre word patterns

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Mark Twain:--Set his stories along the

Mississippi River and used things from daily life in his stories

--brought humor to the novel that was not embraced before

Each in his or her own way brought the American language of farms and streets,

steamboatmen and Westerners, into novels, poems, and essays that

Americans would read. The language was simple and direct, sometimes

slangy, and different than the “literary” and British language that previous

American writers had used.

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RealismRealism is a type of writing during this era where authors tried to re-create everyday reality to help the readers “experience” real life.

These authors believed the truth of experience was to be found in events described accurately and objectively, undistorted by the writer’s imagination.

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Local color: Authors would set their writing in a specific region and

incorporate local speech, customs, setting, regional character,

temperament, and dress into their writing.

One part of realism was the use of something called “local color.”

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Naturalism

The new theories of Darwin, Freud, and Marx were suggesting that biology, psychology, and economics determine each individual’s destiny.

Naturalistic writers took these ideas and applied them to their presentation or

interpretation of the human experience.

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Writers like Ambrose Bierce and Stephen Crane tended to depict life as grim, the universe as cold and spiritless, and the individual as a victim of heredity, society, and natural forces.

Naturalism was pretty much the opposite of Romanticism and Transcendentalism.

All information is taken from “The United States in Literature,” pages 291-293