The first unit of LITR232 is devoted to two artistic styles that dominated American literature between the end of the Civil War (1865) and about 1910: realism and naturalism.  I want to look first at realism, since it came first chronologically.  Then, after we look at naturalism, which happens later, I'll tell you (in a section down below called "the culture") a little about why each of these movements gets big in America when they do. 

Realism
Even though there are rumblings of it in earlier decades (Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, for instance, published in 1850), realism doesn't become the dominant literary style in the U.S. till the 1870s.  And it's the influence of one hugely important novelist and literary critic, a guy named William Dean Howells (his most famous novel is The Rise of Silas Lapham, 1885), that really makes it dominant.  Howells, Henry James, and Mark Twain are the movement's most famous practitioners. 

So how can you tell "realist" literature when you see it?  There are a few ways. 

• First, realism tries hard (just like its name suggests) to present the world as it really is -- the way, for instance, a photograph would capture it.  Howells writes that "realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material."  Since it tries so hard to be truthful, realist literature, unlike much of the "romantic" writing that preceded it, never feels overblown, like a fairy tale or a parable or a dream.  And it's rarely sentimental or emotional.  It just reads like a plain and sensible account of whatever action it's describing.

• This concern with delivering plain and simple truth leads realists to fill their works with details drawn from everyday life, or "facts," we might as well call them.  They can be facts about domestic life, about families and genealogies, about history, about politics, about business and finance, about geographical places....  Whatever.  But to make us believe in the reality of the worlds they show us, realists fill their literature with facts to bolster the reader's feeling that, yes, this is just like the everyday world I live in. 

• And the "everyday" is probably another important concept in realist works.  Realists, generally speaking, don't write about extraordinary people in fantastic situations.  They write about plain, normal, everyday folks dealing with the trials and travails of plain, normal, everyday life.  Melville's Moby Dick (1851), which pretty much defines the romantic literary period that came before realism, is about a crazed sea captain (Ahab) obsessed with killing the biggest, fiercest whale in the world.  Not an everyday person in an everyday situation.  Realist literature, on the other hand, might often leave you saying, "That one character totally reminds me of my aunt."  Again, everyday folks doing everyday things. 

• Since writers are most likely to be factual and convey a sense of the "everyday" when dealing with things they know intimately, many realists write very specifically about places where they lived or grew up.  There's a whole subcategory of American realism, in fact, called "local color," which tries hard to convey the reality of particular places in the U.S.  It's interesting to note, too, that a whole lot of this local-color realism is set in different parts of the Midwest.  Up until the realists' time, most American literature is about the East (New England especially).  But the fact that the American West is becoming increasingly settled late in the 19th century -- and that Americans at this time are fascinated with the notion of "manifest destiny" -- leads to a boom in literature about the nation's newer territories. 

• Setting their works in specific places leads realist writers to make use of specific dialects, or ways of talking that are particular to certain locales.  Before the realists' time, most characters in American literature are simply expected to speak the Queen's English, like good gentlemen and ladies.  In the realist period, though, writers make a conscious effort to let American characters speak various types of American English.  A white man in rural Missouri does not, of course, speak like an English gentleman; thus it wouldn't be factual and "truthful" to make him sound that way.  Similarly, a black man in rural Missouri doesn't talk like a white man from the same place – thus it wouldn't be factual and truthful to make him speak in anything other than his dialect.  Realists have to have an excellent ear to make their characters sound like real Americans.  And by representing different American dialects, these writers help create a genuinely American body of literature – that is, a set of works distinguishable from the European lit most Americans have grown up reading. 

• Realism generally celebrates the individual.  Most realist works feature a central character who has to deal with some moral struggle, hopefully to arrive at an important moral victory or realization before the story's over.  And this, relatedly, often means that much of the "action" in realist lit is internal action: We hear a lot about what's going on in the central character's head; we learn a lot about his or her psychology.  Since realist characters live in the "everyday" world, interesting external things aren't always happening -- thus the "internal" stuff has to take up the slack.  One way or the other, though, realist writers are fascinated by individuals: they love the idea that single human beings must learn, grow, and change their worlds -- or be held responsible for not doing those things. 

• One last thing: realist works are generally plot driven, even if only subtly.  This means they pivot around conflicts we as readers wait to see resolved.  A realist work, then, will typically have at least one protagonist (a main character -- not necessarily a likeable person or a "hero") and one antagonist (another character or a force that will try to prevent the protagonist from getting what s/he wants), and readers will wait to see, as they watch a sequence of increasingly dramatic events, which of them prevails.  This is how any standard story works, but it's important to note that realism does these things, too, because the modernist stuff we'll look at later often refuses plot, going in for a more fragmented or "stream of consciousness" style instead. 

Naturalism is an outgrowth of realism.  Like realism, it wants to present an almost photographically accurate version of "real" life.  It's full of facts and details about an everyday world ordinary people may well recognize.  Its characters speak the same dialects real Americans speak.  And it's generally plot driven. 

So how is naturalism distinguishable from the realism that comes before it, then?  Well.... 

• Naturalist writers aren't interested in individuality the way the realists were.  They don't think it's the individual's place to change the world, and whatever moral struggle s/he goes through may very well add up to little or nothing.  Naturalism's central belief, in fact, is that individual human beings are at the mercy of uncontrollable larger forces that originate both inside and outside them.  These forces might include some of our more "animal" drives, such as the need for food, sex, shelter, social dominance, etc.  Or, in a more "external" vein, these forces might include the natural environment, the man-made environment, or finance, industry, and the economy.  Something, though, is always beating down and controlling the lives of lowly individual humans in naturalist works.  The whole point of this literary movement, in fact, is that this is inevitable.  And yes, it’s often pretty grim. 

• Naturalist works are more likely to be political than traditional realist works.  A great many naturalists (like Upton Sinclair in The Jungle, which is about the plight of the working poor in Chicago's meat-packing industry) want to expose the evil of certain "larger forces," more often than not America's voracious capitalist economy.  It may, in a sense, be inevitable that money crushes poor people's lives, but it might also be true, these writers suggest, that we shouldn't turn a blind eye to it – and that we should, maybe, start thinking about bigger-than-the-individual political movements (like socialism) that might counter capitalism's exploitation of the poor. 

• Naturalist works are more likely than realist works to deal with extraordinary (that is, beyond-the-ordinary) subject matter.  In their desire to show how larger forces control and manipulate people, naturalist works often deal with subjects most comfortable middle-class readers wouldn't consider part of their ordinary lives: war, violence, crime, natural disaster, urban squalor, poverty....  Those more politically charged naturalist works I mentioned above are especially likely to depict things that would shock or jar us, unlike the often more "polite" realist works of, say, William Dean Howells or Henry James. 

We've already touched on a couple reasons why realism becomes dominant in the 1870s.  But let me re-state them for you and maybe add one or two others, too. 

• The Midwest, where so many realist works are set (especially the "local color" variety), is becoming increasingly tied to the rest of the nation in the late 1800s (by the booming new railroad system, most notably).  Late-19th century Americans have a deep and abiding fascination with the West, and realist fiction that describes it to readers is warmly received. 

• There’s a several decade-old push among American literary critics and writers to come up with a genuinely American body of literature, which will be markedly different from the European stuff Americans have long been perceived as imitating.  Celebrating distinctive American settings and distinctive American voices through a bold new "realism" seems a way to give America a literature all its own. 

• There’s a perhaps unfortunate male backlash against a lot of hugely popular "sentimental" women writers who, in the middle of the 19th century, are selling books by the boatload.  Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), is the most famous of them.  Critics like William Dean Howells decide the type of heartstring-tugging stories hundreds of thousands of women readers love aren’t cutting it as capital-L Literature, so he calls for a new "realism" instead. 

• Photography has recently captured the American imagination.  It makes it seem possible for the first time to represent reality dead-on accurately (a phrase especially appropriate after Matthew Brady's Civil War battlefield photos shock the nation), and writers scramble to "develop," if you will, a style that could meet photography's challenge. 

• Thinkers like Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud are becoming important and influential.  What views are they espousing?  Darwin says it's natural selection, not a divine blueprint of some sort, that determines which organisms live and die in the world – it’s mere "survival of the fittest."  Marx says the masses are at the mercy of a capitalist economy, which more often than not brutally exploits them.  And Freud says we’re all at the mercy of dark internal drives and desires we can scarcely hope to control.  All these guys believe our fates are determined, or shaped, by the types of big forces we were thinking about in the "naturalism" section above.  And writers of the time are listening. 

• Not only is the U.S. population growing at a staggering rate at the end of the 19th century, but millions of people are settling into densely crowded urban areas (New York and Chicago are especially booming) where they seem to be living and working more and more like insects, basically.  In these places, it becomes apparent (some thinkers and artists feel) that there’s not a whole lot of difference between humans, who we like to think are individualistic and have free will, and animals, who of course live in flocks, herds, and schools and have to run on instinct. 

• Capitalism is running rampant and unchecked in the United States.  The late 19th century is the age of the "robber barons," or fantastically wealthy industrialists (e.g. Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan) whose personal fortunes skyrocket while ever-growing throngs of workers (many of them immigrants) put in hundred-hour weeks for pennies in urban "sweatshops."  That so many people have to suffer miserably while a lucky few live in opulent luxury is more evidence to naturalists that the vast majority of people are pawns to gargantuan forces (money, in this case) that do to us whatever they like.