How does American Realism differ from American Romanticism?
The literature reflecting the American situation between the Civil War and World War was called American Realism, a reaction against Romanticism or a move away from the bias towards romance and self-creating fictions. The period after the Civil War with the rise of industrialization and commercialization and the collapse of transcendental optimism was called by Mark Twain as the Gilded Age. Tired of romantic sentimentalism and facing the harsh social realities and disillusioned heroism from the war・ writers began to adapt a new attitude of great interest in actuality of life, free from subjective prejudices or idealism. Adhering to the truthful presentation of everyday existence, the brutal life and class struggle, realists portrayed workers and farmers, businessmen and unheroic soldiers, instead of imaginative issues and elegant middle-class youths.P399,471
