anthology notes

7/27/2019 Anthology Notes

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Anthology- notes:

Huckleberry FinnImmigrants usually took the least skilled industrial jobs and were viewed by the

native-born and by earlier arrivals with apprehension and distrust, because theirdifferent manners and customs, modes of dress, and religious observances wereseen as threatening and disruptive to Anglo-Saxon hegemony and power. So,assimilation was the prescribed goal (melting pot).(***)The conditions of urban life and of the industrial workers thatincreasingly catalyzed writers and reformers and that led to the outpouring of socialprotest literature, as well as to direct political action. The periodic breakdowns ofthe economy that resulted from uncontrolled industrial growth affected all groups,including farmers and middle class; however, immigrants and the working classwere the most affected by them. There were like 2 kinds of society, and cities suchas Chicago ignored these urban realities.Immigrants: Irish, Czech, Russian Jewish, and Italian. Ireland, England, Germany,

Poland, Austria, Turkey, Greece and Syria

After the civil war (Reconstruction period) corruption was well spread and was aperiod of economic development. It was The Gilded Age, as Mark Twain called it,and captured in the novel of that title, its fever of unrestrained speculation and get-rich-quick scheme, its glitter and fraudulence.

The post-war period was characterized by the growth of giant corporations,monopolies, and trusts. In these, hundreds or thousands of workers were employed,and their work was reduced to an alienating one.

(***) In the South when the war ended and the army left, Government wanted to

educate the black population, but ex-slaves had to work forlandowners(for a very low wage), so it was difficult for blacks to learn becausethey had to earn their living too. White population kept discriminating them.Government established a program in order to teach ex-slaves, but the effect tooktime to educate population and whoever wanted to vote had to be literate and knowhow to write and read. Southerners felt that Government was invading their rights,so they had resentment.

(***) The concentration of vast resources in the hands of a few constitutedone of the most drastic changes from the pre-war period. Business, bigbusiness was the order of the day, and the fortunes reaped from it were

justified by an ideology that drew upon the old protestant ethic of the virtuousness

of industry and of the acquisition of wealth as proof of Gods favour, and also on thenew social thinking derived from Darwins biological theories of human evolution,which defended what sociologist Herbert Spencer termed the survival of thefittest, a theory that said that just the strongest will survive to hard times.. Biology(important for Stephen Crane) said that we are not created by God, but that we arecreated by a natural process.

The largest audience was probably that created and served by the Story Papers(newspapers that printed romance and adventure stories in serial instalments) and

Dime novels (they were superficial stories and repetitive,but cheap and characterized by the underlying mythos of

individualism and self-reliance) became popular. Theyoffered simple-than-life and larger-than-life


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heroes/heroines. Horatio Alger publishes more than a hundred novels withtitles like Strive and Succeed or Struggling Upward which were catchy labels fortheir packaged messages of success achieved through a combination ofindustriousness, middle class morality and luck. He believed that in America youcan became rich if you work hard, and in his novels he exemplifies it.

(***) All this functioned as an important part of the acculturation process for millionsof immigrants, introducing them to the values of white Protestant culture.Later, detective stories set in the city offered new heroes in recognition of the newurban world, including its crime and violence and corruption.On yet another level were the literary magazines, where much of the exciting andimportant literature of the period appeared, such as Mark Twain or Stephen Crane.

Tall tale: its a strategy in piece of work, were things are veryexaggerated. Normally, this literature is told orally. Writers wrote anintroduction to say that they are good writers.The Tall Tale: is high exaggerated way of presenting the way of speaking of a

particular group of people (Western people); by presenting it in a written way.Usually they describe the frontier people. They are described as strong andindependent people. The writer of the tall tale tried to justify themselves by sayingthat they were educated people, they criticised a lot the system, the society. Therewere lots of people written

Local colorist (or regionalist) has characteristics of drama and realism.Local colorist is the second division of realism. Nevertheless regionalism was animportant defining characteristic of the periods writing. In face of the increasinghomogeneity and standardization of life attendant on mass production and massdistribution of goods and entertainment, interest in preserving local and regional

folkways and traditions that were in imminent danger of being lost was widespread.The feminist canon has reread realism.As the 1890s advanced, realism darkened its hues, and a new literature by ayounger generation emerged with a distinctively new emphasis. Naturalism is theterm used to describe the fiction, or a dominant element in it, of writers likeStephen Crane, where environmental forces, whether of nature or the city, outweighor overwhelm human agency, the individual can exert little or no control overdetermining events, and the world is at worst hostile, at best indifferent tohumankind.

Determinism is the philosophical belief that events are shaped by forces

beyond the control of human beings. Scientific Determinism, important toliterature at the end of the nineteenth century, assigns control especially toheredity and environment, without seeking their origins further than science cantrace. (The Harper Handbook of Literature)

Womens role in society:The single most significant fact about women, specially white, middle-class women,as a group in the post-war period was their visibility, as they increasingly movedbeyond domestic discourse to lay claim to the public world. For some, women werea potentially vital new force. But if appearance of such characters was anencouraging sign, their fictional fates were not. Most often they were contained

within the conventions of the traditional romantic plot, punished rather thanrewarded for their forays into the world by endings that offered only a choice


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between a confining marriage and death and older attitudes toward women alsopersisted: women as civilizing agent who censors man freedom, as in HuckleberryFinn, or the woman as helpless victim, in Cranes narrative of a young girl driven toprostitution, Maggie: A Girl Of The Streets.Women success nevertheless importantly demonstrated that women could be theintellectual equals of men, thus countering the still prevalent belief in womensinferiority.In the post war period, women writers carried further themes introduced by womenbefore the war, and they introduced new themes and concerns.

(***) African-American writers, on the other hand, drew upon andreflected crucial realities in their lives. The most critical event is the abolition ofslavery.

The association in the public mind of dialect and vernacular language with comicignorance and inferiority posed a dilemma for the black writer who wanted totranscribe the racial experience in the language of the rural black masses.

(***) In the post-Reconstruction period years (1867-1877), both illegal and legalmethods of constraint and intimidation increased against black people, above all inthe south (Klu Klux Klan, for ex.). So virulent were attacks on the black communitybetween 1880 and 1900 that the period was called the nadir of the free blackslaves. The terms on which blacks could or should enter into white mainstreamsociety were in fact the subject of extensive and ongoing debate.

(***) Native-Americans suffered discontinuity after the Civil War, as white Americansociety penetrated and firmly rooted itself in even the remotest interior of the trans-Mississippi West. White Americans belief that the Indians were casualties of thesweep of the Caucasian across the face of the continent, and that they were

destined to vanish, losers in the struggle for the fittest survivors. Opposed to thisview were those well-meaning reformers in their way of life, the American Indianscould be saved. Indian Reservation land was viewed as a vast resource waiting tobe exploited, so white people wanted their assimilation or destruction.When Native Americans were sent to school for a few years, given Christianinstruction, discouraged from speaking their native languages or followingtraditional practices, and provided with vocational training in the trades. Theassumption underlying this plan was that the students could not return to thereservation and feel satisfied with conditions there.Native American and white writers shaped the new public awareness of the effectsof removal and contributed significantly to the development of an Indian policyreform movement that culminated in a major step toward assimilation. Much

literary production by Indians in this period was in some way a response to theefforts at assimilation. In the face of growing evidence that full participation inAmerican society was impossible for American Indians, writers who had earlyembraced white Americas ways, became embittered, professed their paganism,and began a revival of interest in American Indian cultures that other generationswould lead to the reforms in the 1920s and 30 that attempted to arrest many of thedevastating effects allotment and recognized the value of cultural pluralism.

Through the efforts of the Indian Territory writers Indian literature began to find anational market. Their work deal with the problem of double identity, with what is tobe an American, and there was a surge of interest in Indian oral traditions and triballore.Documentary: An insight job


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