How did literature change after the 1870s?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answer: The ideal answer should include:
1. Authors turned to realism, portraying life as it was and rejecting the romanticism and escapism that was popular in the years after the Civil War.
2. Authors studied local dialects, wrote regional stories, and emphasized “true” relationships
between people.
3. Literature reflected broader social trends, such as industrialism, evolutionary theory, and
pragmatism.
4. Regional authors depicted life in the South, the grimness of life on the Great Plains, and everyday life in rural New England.
5. Mark Twain became the country’s most outstanding realist author, drawing on his own
experiences in his stories and using dialect and common speech instead of literary language.
6. Naturalists, who became impatient with realism, pushed Darwinian theory to its limits by writing about a world in which a merciless environment determined human fate.
7. Naturalists often focused on economic hardship and studied the poor, the lower classes, and the criminal mind for their writings.