American History

[Name of the Institute]American History

Introduction

The last third of the 19th century saw the emergence of massliterature in America along with profound shifts in the style and content of serious writing. magazines were the principal purveyors ofliterature for the masses. At mid-century, most fiction and poetry appeared first in the leading magazines, but after the Civil War new magazines proliferated, increasing 10-fold by 1900 as new modes of distribution enabled them to reach a larger audience. Book publication also expanded significantly, though prior to 1891 many titles were by foreign authors, largely because the absence of international copyright protection enabled American publishers to reprint cheap editions of foreign works without paying for the rights. The International Copyright Law of 1891 ended that practice and enlarged the market for Americanauthors (Eric, 1993).

American popular literature during the middle and late years of the19th century was rigidly gendered. Women, who took the greatest interest in literature, generally preferred sentimental romances full of melodramatic incidents and moral uplift, and book publishers and magazine editors catered to their tastes. Men usually preferred dime novels depicting the heroic (and often violent) activities of detective Nick Carter, frontiersman Buffalo Bill (William Frederick Cody), and other adventurers.

In the realm of serious literature, most American fiction in the years between 1870 and 1900 conformed to one or another of three major paradigms: the genteel tradition, realism, and naturalism. The genteel tradition, which upheld the traditional values associated withVictorianism, prevailed in the 1870s. During the 1880s realists launched a literary revolution with their controversial but authentic depictions of the people, places, and circumstances that genteel writers preferred to ignore. Realism, by focusing attention on the dilemmas and hardships of common Americans, prepared the way for the naturalism of the 1890s, with its emphasis on socioeconomic or biological determinism in the struggle for survival.

Discussion

The genteel tradition was the literary standard during the second half of the 19th century; respectability was its hallmark. Originally, such writing was mostly by and for white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, especially those of the eastern establishment. It reflected their notions of art, propriety—even reality. Genteel culture was cosmopolitan and Anglophile (Victorian) in taste and Germanic (Idealist) in philosophy. Through quality magazines such as the Century, North AmericanReview, Harper's Monthly, and Atlantic Monthly, elite literary preferences infiltrated the cultured elements of the middle class. Editors of those magazines—Richard Henry Stoddard, George Boker,Richard Watson Gilder, Edmund Clarence Stedman, and Thomas Bailey Aldrich—were guardians of the genteel tradition and arbiters of literary taste. Indeed, Aldrich, as novelist, poet, and editor of the Atlantic Monthly from 1881 to 1890, was the acknowledged master of the genteel style and, for a time, the nation's most esteemed author. Thanks to Aldrich and other leading editors, American literature was no longer the exclusive domain of literary ladies and gentlemen of the eastern elite; it had become a profession. Readers came to expectliterature that was well-crafted, traditional in form, high-minded in content, and full of highly selective, even idealized, depictions of reality, whether the setting was American or, as it often was, international (Jay, 1967).

Even during the 1870s, however, the genteel tradition came under attack. It had grown formulaic, effete, and out of touch with a nation experiencing turbulent social, economic, and technological ...