Local Color

US Literature after the Civil War

The Civil War sharply interrupted American literary activity. Although seven of the ten major authors of the pre-war period continued to write after the war, most of these had done their best work by 1860. Literary leadership passed to a new generation of writers. Their work, interesting in itself, is also interesting because it prepared the way for the excellent writing which followed in the 20th century.

The disillusionment of this period found expression in the realistic and psychological novel. Ambrose Bierce and Stephen Crane wrote realistic war stories; Mark Twain and Bret Harte dealt with Western life; the growth of industrialism led to novels of social realism, notably the works of William Howells and Frank Norris; and Henry James and his disciple Edith Wharton developed the novel of psychological analysis among the well-to-do. The short story flourished, its leading practitioners being Henry James, Bret Harte, and Ambrose Bierce.

The pragmatic age did not encourage the development of poetry. Nevertheless, the two major poets of the previous period, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman continued their work. Whitman wrote some of his best verse after the war. Drum-Taps (1865) contains brilliant and moving war vignettes; and the excellent long poem Passage to India (1871) voices his hope for world unity and his belief in the oneness of creation.

From THE PASSAGE TO INDIA

Singing my days,

Singing the great achievements of the present,

Singing the strong light works of engineers,

Our modern wonders (the antique ponderous Seven outvied):

In the Old World the east, the Suez Canal,

The New by its mighty railroad spanned…

But despite the poetry by Whitman and Dickinson, the postwar years seemed better fit for prose than for verse.

The change in American literature in the 1870s was conditioned not only by the historic events, but also by economic and social reasons. The increasing concentration of publishing houses in a single city, New York; new schemes for the manufacture, sale, and distribution of printed matter; the effectiveness of the public school systems, which created a larger reading public; the wider teaching of English literature and of foreign languages and literatures; and the increasing effectiveness of literary periodicals contributed to the development of American prose. The decades following 1870 were the golden age of the American magazine, including the most prestigious and influential Atlantic Monthly magazine, founded in 1857, four years before the Civil War. In 1870s, James Russell Lowell, its editor, promoted stories emphasizing what came to be known as ‘local color’, and so local color, or regional story and novel, dominated the writing of the 1870s and the 1880s.

Regionalism is an inherent feature of American literature, and in the 1870s every section of the country was represented in local-color stories. The local colorists took over the task of portraying particular regional and social groups. Their aim was to portray realistically the lives of various sections and thus to promote understanding and appreciation of different identities within a united nation.

The realistic quality was achieved by careful portrayal of the customs, manners, and especially the speech ways of the locality. However, because the authors usually depicted their regions as they were in their own youth, they often flavored their stories with sentiment. The mixture of realism and sentiment was appealing, and local-color stories filled the pages of the leading magazines until the end of the century. Touched by romance though they were, these fictional works were transitional to realism, for they did portray common folk sympathetically; they did concern themselves with dialect and customs; and at least some of them avoided older sentimental or romantic formulas.

Дата добавления: 2014-01-11