Influences On Literary Realism In America

Influences on Literary Realism in America The realist literary movement in America began in 1865 and continued to gain momentum until about 1914, when the Great War began. It was a reaction to the idealized world of romanticism, in which the values of heroism, imagination, and emotion were highly treasured. Romantic literature emphasized the ideal by describing characters rising out of their situations to overcome ills of society or personal struggles, and these stories often had happy endings or strong moral messages. While romanticism exalted the individual, and the common man in particular, it always portrayed the protagonists as innately good; any flaws or defects in the character were overcome in the end. Romanticism focused on
In the short story “To Build a Fire,” the main character is traveling through a frozen -75° F frontier with confidence, and finds himself overestimating his capability to survive. London writes, “[the cold] did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man 's frailty in general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there on it did not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and man 's place in the universe.” These lines portray the man as one who is ill-educated, because the dangerous conditions do not give him pause or even cause him to think about his own life 's fragility. He simply assumes that his ability to care for himself is more powerful than the elements he is battling, and because of this overconfidence, he unknowingly submits to nature’s power. His worry-free arrogance is a characteristic that would not, perhaps, have adversely affected him were he a character in a romantic novel; however, Jack London 's portrayal of nature as pure objectivity means that the man 's overconfidence will cost him