The Frontier Component of Realism (Use this as your title.) An idealized or romantic view of life is always possible in a settled society that has found solutions to most problems. The American frontier (wagon trains going west, endless prairies, mountain barriers, hostile Indians, lawless Western towns) spawned a realistic treatment in fiction. Apply this to Bret Hartes The Luck of Roaring Camp. 2 The War Component of Realism (Use this as your title.) Romantics do not give up their ideals easily, if ever. But war is unromantic, and war novels are necessarily realistic, sometimes brutally naturalistic, as illustrated by Stephen Cranes The Red Badge of Courage, Remarques All Quiet on the Western Front, or Norman Mailers The Naked and the Dead. Most people could add several war movies to the list. The question to address is this: In Howells story, what does Editha learn? 3 The Slavery Component of American Realism (Use this as your title.) Most realistic treatments of slavery (like Mark Twains Huckleberry Finn, or the modern novel by Alex Haley, Roots) portray a brutal side of slavery. But Joel Chandler Harris Free Joe shows another view of the slavery component of realism; what is the status of a freed slave? 4 The Dialect Component of Realism (Use this as your title.) Through at least six decades (1800 to 1865) of the nineteenth century, writers always wrote in the best English. When ordinary people in stories talked, they use standard English with no elisions (such as Im, hes, theyre, couldnt, wont, and many more). They used perfect grammar. Natty Bumppo, the outdoor frontiersman hero of Coopers novels, spoke like a Harvard graduate. Around 1865, some writers recognized that perfect English in speech was not realistic. Mark Twain introduced dialect in The Celebrated Jumping Frog. The Brer (a contraction of Brother) Rabbit stories altered spelling to capture speech. Explain the value of dialect for realism. Explain how you feel about its use; does it help? Does it get in the way? Should writers use it?
Explain the value of dialect for realism.
