Many critics have suggested that there is no clear distinction between realism and its related late nineteenth-century movement, naturalism. As Donald Pizer notes in his introduction to The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism: Howells to London, the term "realism" is difficult to define, in part because it is used differently in European contexts than in American literature. Pizer suggests that "whatever was being produced in fiction during the 1870s and 1880s that was new, interesting, and roughly similar in a number of ways can be designated as realism, and that an equally new, interesting, and roughly similar body of writing produced at the turn of the century can be designated as naturalism" (5). Put rather too simplistically, one rough distinction made by critics is that realism espousing a deterministic philosophy and focusing on the lower classes is considered naturalism.
In American literature, the term "realism" encompasses the period of
time from the Civil War to the turn of the century during which William
Dean Howells, Rebecca Harding Davis, Henry James, Mark Twain, and others
wrote fiction devoted to accurate representation and an exploration of
American lives in various contexts. As the United States grew rapidly after
the Civil War, the increasing rates of democracy and literacy, the rapid
growth in industrialism and urbanization, an expanding population base
due to immigration, and a relative rise in middle-class affluence provided
a fertile literary environment for readers interested in understanding
these rapid shifts in culture. In drawing attention to this connection,
Amy Kaplan has called realism a "strategy for imagining and managing the
threats of social change" (Social Construction of American Realism
ix).
William Dean Howells |
As editor of the Atlantic Monthly and of Harper's New Monthly Magazine, William Dean Howells promoted writers of realism as well as those writing local color fiction. |