Jack London (1876 года —1916)

In general, naturalism is the literary movement that provides the best context for Jack London. The appeal of naturalistic tales is often escape. The urban problems of unemployment, labor wars, and poverty are left behind for a spare scenario in which an individual can be tested.

A naturalistic device involves taking an "overcivilized" man from the upper classes into a primitive environment where he must live by muscle and wit.

In another common naturalistic pattern, the hero who stays in the city either becomes an ineffectual dandy or degenerates into a lower-class brute.

London read many books and believed in Darwin's evolutionary theory of “survival of the fittest” and also Nietzsche's superman.

The Sea-Wolf

The Call of the Wild (1903)

White Fang (1906)

People of the Abyss

Martin Eden

Hardships in nature force London’s characters to be flexible and resourceful in order to survive— and sometimes, fail. Often rejecting civilization in order to follow an inner intuition, characters like Buck (The Call of the Wild) function within Charles Darwin’s construct of survival of the fittest.

Francis Bret Harte (1836 –1902) was an American author and poet, best remembered for his accounts of pioneering life in California. – РАЗВИТИЕ АМЕРИКАНСКОЙ НОВЕЛЛЫ

Bret Harte, the first American writer from the West Coast to gain an international reputation, was instrumental in introducing frontier literature to eastern audiences. His stories established many of the basic characteristics of the western genre: rough, sarcastic humor, rustic dialect, and character types such as good-natured gamblers, greedy bankers, and prostitutes with hearts of gold. His literary fame was brief, lasting less than a decade, but it helped make possible the success of other frontier writers.

In Harte’s best stories he balances realistic description, dialect, and characterization with sentimental plots and narration. His tales rely heavily on local color. Bret Harte’s writing was instrumental in popularizing stories of the western frontier and in establishing the characteristics of the western genre that survive in books and movies today.

Их натуралистическая новелла рисует американскую жизнь в резких и суровых чертах, нащупывая ее коренные социальные противоречия.

25. Литературные тенденции рубежа 19-20вв.: Г.Джеймс.

American fiction

Henry James, (1843-1916)

In his short stories and novels, he created characters of great psychological complexity. His reviews, essays, and prefaces have established him as one of the most important theorists of fiction.

The Wings of the Dove (1902)

The Ambassadors (1903)

The Turn of the Screw (1898)

The Portrait of a Lady (1881)

His protagonists were often young American women facing oppression or abuse.

26. Творчество У.Фолкнера.

MODERNISM

Stream of consciousness

William Faulkner (1897-1962)

Faulkner created an entire imaginative landscape, Yoknapatawpha County, mentioned in numerous novels, along with several families with interconnections extending back for generations. Yoknapatawpha County, with its capital, "Jefferson," is closely modeled on Oxford, Mississippi, and its surroundings. Faulkner re-creates the history of the land and the various races – Indian, African-American, Euro-American, and various mixtures – who have lived on it. An innovative writer, Faulkner experimented brilliantly with narrative chronology, different points of view and voices (including those of outcasts, children, and illiterates), and a rich and demanding baroque style built of extremely long sentences full of complicated subordinate parts. 
The best of Faulkner's novels include The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930), two modernist works experimenting with viewpoint and voice to probe southern families under the stress of losing a family member; Light in August (1932), about complex and violent relations between a white woman and a black man; and Absalom, Absalom! (1936), perhaps his finest, about the rise of a self-made plantation owner and his tragic fall through racial prejudice and a failure to love. 
Most of these novels use different characters to tell parts of the story and demonstrate how meaning resides in the manner of telling, as much as in the subject at hand. The use of various viewpoints makes Faulkner more self-referential, or "reflexive," than Hemingway or Fitzgerald; each novel reflects upon itself, while it simultaneously unfolds a story of universal interest. Faulkner's themes are southern tradition, family, community, the land, history and the past, race, and the passions of ambition and love. He also created three novels focusing on the rise of a degenerate family, the Snopes clan: The Hamlet (1940), The Town (1957), and The Mansion (1959).

The Sound and Fury

Part 1: April 7, 1928 Benjy

Part 2: June 2, 1910 Quentin

Part 3: April 6, 1928 Jason

Part 4: April 8, 1928 Dilsey

(Appendix: Compson: 1699 – 1945)