Realismo DISSERTATION TOPIC: THE ERA OF REALISM AND NATURALISM

...

James’s career as a writer can be divided into three stages:

Early Stage

The novels of his stage deal with his thoughts and feelings as an American living in Europe. He spent most of his life in England and in1915 he finally got his English citizenship. His main works of this stage are:

Roderick Hudson (1876) tells the failure story of a young American artist in Italy because of his lack of moral strength even though he was very talented.

The Americans (1877) contrasts American ‘innocence’ with European ‘experience’ showing the story of Christopher Newman who goes to Europe in search of better life and wants to marry a young woman of the aristocracy. Her parents do not agree with that idea because of his feeling superiors than Newman´s origins.

Daisy Miller (1879) is another novel where he shows American innocence defeated by the European traditional ‘values’. In this story, James shows how daisy looks at people as individuals more than a members of a social group. It does not feat in the Europeans beliefs, so, it leads her to death.

Middle Stage

The Portrait of a Lady (1881) is the best novel of this period of his career. This is a story of another young American girl in Europe exploring life who receives many good offers of marriage, but she chooses the wrong one. This situation leads her and the reader to explore her inner thoughts after realizing that harmful truth.

The princess Casamassima (1886) is about a revolutionary hero who wants to destroy European aristocracy, but eventually he falls in love with the aristocrat´s life style.

Mature Stage

The Ambassadors (1903) is about the story of a middle aged American who goes to Paris to rescue a friend´s son from the ‘evils’ of the European society, but gradually he changes his point of view of that society an falls charmed deciding do stay there while who goes back to America is the boy.

Henry James almost always avoids giving a very large detailed picture of the society. Instead, he selects a particular situation or problem that commonly is the nature of art. Then, using his imagination, he studies that problem from different points of view. Some of his excellent short stories are:

The Real Thing (1893) shows how an artist wants to create a picture of typical aristocrats failing in his attempt to do it using real aristocrats as models. He realizes that lower class models are better for his purposes than real ones because real models do not allow him use his imagination.

The Death of the Lion (1894) tells the story of a famous writer who faces a problem being too popular getting busy with his admirers to write.

The Beast in the Jungle (1903) tells about a hero who is sure that something terrible is going to happen to him. Eventually he realizes that the only bad thin that would happen is that nothing happened at all.

AMBROSE BIERCE (1842-1914)

He was one of the few important writers in the late nineteenth-century America who was not a realist or a naturalist. The struggles of ordinary people in the everyday world did not interest him. Like Edgar Allan Poe, he loved to describe terrifying events and strange forms of death. His famous short stories about the Civil War in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891) and Can Such Things Be? (1893) are actually horror stories. Irony is an important element in each of them. His books: A horseman in the sky (1891) a young soldier in the Northern army meets his father near his old home. But there is no joy at the meeting. Because the father is an officer in the Southern army, the son must kill him.in The Devil´s Dictionary (1911), Bierce uses humor to express his ironic view of the world.

The Turn of the Screw (1898) is a famous ghost story about two children and teir nurse. The nurse is sure that they are being haunted by ghosts, but it is not clear whether the ghosts are real or just in the nurse’s imagination.

One of the main features of his works is that he wants to show the problem being American who is always tested by European civilization.

Harold Chirinos Mamani C. I. 6160223 L.P.