American Literary Movements: From Domesticity to Southern Renaissance

Establishment of American Literature

The creation of secure public value for literary works was crucial. In the 1850s, popular fiction written by women, such as Mrs. Southworth, Caroline Lee Hentz, and Mary Jane Holmes, saw unprecedented sales. These bestsellers succeeded because they spoke directly to the evolving world of women and family life, reflecting new middle-class norms of domestic propriety. They also helped organize domestic leisure into a marketable commodity. Two factors shaped this era: women's writing and a middle-class domestic audience. This crystallized the readership and reading habits that would define literary consumption in late 19th-century America. The rise of mass journalism (the "penny-press") in the 1840s, which published fiction, and the emergence of the dime novel in the 1850s further fueled this trend.

Realism

In French aesthetic theory, "realism" denoted art based on accurate, unromanticized observation of life and nature, often defying convention (e.g., Gustave Flaubert's prose, Gustave Courbet's paintings). American realism, from the 1870s to the early 1900s, developed as a series of responses to the transformation of land into capital, raw materials into products, agrarian values into urban values, and private experience into public property.

New Woman in the Late 19th Century

The "New Woman" was a powerful social and literary figure in the 1890s. She embodied new values, challenged the existing male order, and was independent, outspoken, and iconoclastic. Notable women writers of this period include Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Alice James.

Naturalism and Determinism

Naturalism portrays characters deprived of free will, subject to fate or determinism. Melodrama was a favored genre. Naturalists often dismissed realists as too "gentle." A key distinction is that realism features free characters, while naturalism features characters who are not free.

The Southern Renaissance

The Southern Renaissance, beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, reinvigorated American Southern literature. Writers like William Faulkner, Caroline Gordon, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Katherine Anne Porter, Allen Tate, Tennessee Williams, and Robert Penn Warren emerged. They were more objective in their writings about the South, maintaining some distance from the Civil War and slavery. Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1936), a Pulitzer Prize winner, is one of the best-known Southern novels. Post-World War II Southern literature embraced social and cultural changes resulting from the Civil Rights Movement, with increased acceptance of female and African American writers.