ENG 209:
AMERICAN LIT AFTER 1865
SPRING 2014
UT
KEY AUTHORS
FRANK NORRIS
(1870-1902), American novelist and literary critic, was the author of novels -- including McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (1899) and The Octopus: A Story of California (1901) -- that contain social commentary, realistic settings, and working-class characters. These elements place his work in the school of American naturalism, among such authors as Jack London, Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser (of whose work Norris was an early champion). Norris's literary criticism includes 'The Responsibilities of the Novelist', among other essays.
KATE CHOPIN
(1850-1904) was an American writer who came to prominence at the fin de siècle with her short stories, many about Louisiana life. She was admired in her lifetime chiefly for her 'charming' depictions of 'local colour', and the work now regarded as her great achievement, the novel The Awakening (1899), was accorded a decidedly mixed reception. Since the late 1960s this novel has come to be regarded as a classic of American literature and is a staple of literature and women's studies university courses, though it is not yet very familiar to general readers. Bearing in mind The Awakening, the story of a woman's sense of oppression in conventional marriage and her burning desire (not uncomplicatedly fulfilled) for liberty, modern critics tend to value most highly those of Chopin's short stories that, in her lifetime, were regarded as distasteful and even unrespectable, dealing with sexuality and the less than fairytale aspects of relationships between the sexes.
EDITH WHARTON
STEPHEN CRANE
(1862-1937) was a prominent American novelist and short-story writer, remembered for her satirical novels about late nineteenth-century American East Coast society, a clutch of emotionally intense novellas and numerous short stories. She also wrote about interior design, Italian houses and gardens, her travels in Europe and her experiences in France during the First World War. She was a friend of Henry James, and her work has certain affinities with his (in preferring exposition to dialogue, in the use of irony, and in addressing the relationship between America and Europe), but after her very early works comparisons are difficult to sustain, and she was frustrated by the contemporary critical tendency to bracket her more satirical, less involuted, works with his.
(1871-1900), American author best known for his Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage, was born on 1 November 1871 in Newark, New Jersey. He was the fourteenth and youngest child of the Reverend Dr Jonathan Townley Crane, a Methodist minister, and Mary Helen Peck Crane. His mother was descended from a long line of Methodists and was active in church and reform work as a journalist and speaker. During Crane's early years, the family moved a number of times as Dr Crane accepted new ecclesiastical posts in various small villages in New Jersey and New York. In 1878 the family settled in Port Jervis, a rural town beside the Delaware River in upstate New York, where Crane entered public school. After Crane's father died unexpectedly in 1880, his mother became increasingly devout. In 1883 she moved the family to Asbury Park, New Jersey, then a seaside Methodist enclave and self-described 'resort free from sin', where she was elected president of the local Women's Christian Temperance Union. Left free to roam the seaside boardwalk, Crane discovered and was drawn to many of the 'social ills' -- including drinking, smoking and baseball -- that his mother sought to reform. Perhaps it was through his early discovery of the gulf between Asbury Park's pious self-image and its tawdry reality that Crane developed his ironic sensibility and the mistrust of moral dogma that would figure largely in his work. Later in his career, he made his viewpoint plain when he wrote: 'Preaching is fatal to art in literature. I try to give readers a slice out of life, and if there is any moral or lesson in it I do not point it out. I let the reader find it for himself.'
Works Cited/Consulted would go down here somewhere