will need to consult many books, analysis. In this case, I mean that the use of other materials or references in the bibliography section will be consulted. I will, of
course, need them to support the analysis.
1.6 Review of The Related Literature
- The Jazz Age, by Max Bofart 1969.
This book is very useful in understanding what happened in the American society at that time.
- The American Novel and its Tradition, by Richard Chase 1979.
This book gives me a lot of information about Theodore Dreiser and the American literature by the end of the nineteen century.
- A Glossary of Literary Terms, by M.H. Abrams 1982.
This book is very valuable in giving the information about some major term in literature, such as romanticism, realism, naturalism, and surrealism.
- The Lixington Introduction to Literature, by Cary Waller 1987.
This book provides the responding to the texts of the literary woks. In this case, I get some information about how to respond the text of the novel.
- How to analyze fiction, by William Kenney 1966.
This book provides various ways to analyze the aspects of the literary works, especially the discussion on the aspects which are found in the prose writing.
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- The third Dimension, Studies in literary history, by E.R. Spieler 1965.
This book is very important for me to understand in order to know the life background of the author of the novel. It will help me understand a little bit
the naturalism in the American literature. -
Theory of Literature, by Rene Wellek and Austin Warren 1977. This book can help me understand the way how to analyze the novel. It talks
a lot about the theory of approaches in analyzing the literary work.
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CHAPTER II THE EXPLICATION OF REALISM AND NATURALISM
2.1 Realism
Realism is used in two ways: 1 to identify a literary movement of the nineteenth century, especially in prose fiction, and 2 to designate a recurrent way,
in this and other eras, of representing life in literature, which was typified by the writers of this historical movement Abrams, 1980: 152.
Realistic fiction is often opposed to romantic fiction: the romance is said to present life as we would have it to be, more picturesque, more adventurous, more
heroic than the actual, realism, to present an accurate imitation of life as it is. The distinction is not invalid, but it is in adequate. Winston Churchill, Lady Diana,
Martin Luther King Jr., George Washington were people in real life, but their histories, as related by themselves or others, demonstrate that truth can be stranger
than literary realism. The realist sets out to write a fiction which will give the illusion that it
reflects life as it seems to the common reader. To achieve this effect he prefers as protagonist an ordinary citizen of Middletown, living on the Main Street, perhaps,
and engaged in the real estate business. The realist, in the other words, is deliberately selective in his material and prefers the average, the commonplace, and the everyday
over the rarer aspects of the contemporary scene. His characters, therefore, are usually of the middle class or less frequently the working class–people with out
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highly exceptional endowments, who live through ordinary experiences of childhood, adolescence, love, marriage, parenthood, infidelity, and death; who find
life rather dull and often unhappy, though it may be brightened by touches of beauty and joy; but who may, under special circumstances, display something akin the
heroism. A thoroughgoing realism involves not only a selection of subject matter but,
more importantly, a special literary manner as well: the subject is represented, or ‘rendered’ in such a way as to give the reader the illusion of actual experience. The
realistic writers often render ordinary people so richly and persuasively that they convince us that men and women really lived, talked, and acted in the way that they
depict. Some critics, however, use the term “realist” more narrowly for writers who
render a subject so as to make it seem a reflection of the casual order of experience, without too patently shaping it into a tightly wrought comic or ironic or tragic
pattern. In this narrow sense, “realism” is applied more exclusively, to works such as William Dean Howell’s The Rise Of Silas Lapham, Arnold Sennet’s novels about the
“Five Towns”, and Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street.
2.2 Naturalism
