Transforming American Realism

ISBN: 9780761836117

出版社: Rowman & Littlefield Pub Inc

出版年: 2006-12

页数: 148

定价: $ 27.12

装帧: Pap

内容简介

At the turn of the twentieth century, realism meant drunken laborers participating in sordid sex and violent acts. As the century progressed, however, the workers seized the pen and forcibly changed the genre. When today's critics label realism a reactionary attempt to squelch social change, they ignore how working-class writers transformed it to fit their own interests. In doing so, they altered the course of American realism. Working-class women bent to their own purposes several variants of realism, including naturalism, proletarian realism, and magic realism. From the 1903 best-seller by two socialites who posed as 'factory girls' and wrote about their experiences, to the depression-era authors who tried to include women in the proletariat by writing about sex, to the later writers who incorporated their cultural heritage to create precursors of magic realism, the rise of working-class fiction has helped realism remain fresh, relevant, and lucrative.