Regionalism or Local Color

Became dominant between the Civil War and the end of the nineteenth century

Blend of romanticism’s strange/exotic settings and realism’s accurate, detailed description

Focus is on characters, dialect, customs, and other features particular to a specific region

Setting is integral to the story

Narrator is usually an educated observer
Realism
Often defined as “the faithful representation of reality” or “verisimilitude”
An accurate representation and exploration of American lives in various contexts
Became dominant after the Civil War because of the Industrial Revolution, the rise of middle class, literacy, and education
Diction is natural vernacular
Tone may be serious, satiric, humorous
Subjects are people living in society and their relationships: birth, death, money, love, courtship, marriage, childhood, adolescence, parenthood, infidelity, social problems of times
Mixed characters, not idealized -- both good & bad, strong & weak elements
Conflicts: protagonist (not “hero”) vs. antagonist (not “villain”)

Naturalism
Apply scientific principles of objectivity and detachment to human beings

Focus is on philosophical position – determinism, a theory or doctrine that acts of the will, occurrences in nature, or social or psychological phenomena are causally determined by preceding events or natural laws

Human beings as “products” of their environment are studied impartially, without moralizing about their natures.

Narrator is objective, detached, distant, unemotional

Characters are often ill-educated or lower-class whose lives are governed by the forces of heredity, instinct, and passion. Characters struggle to retain a “veneer of civilization” despite external pressures that threaten to release the “brute within.”

Conflicts are usually “man against nature” or “man against himself” or both.

Nature is an indifferent force acting on the lives of human beings.

Human beings, affected and afflicted by the forces of heredity and environment, attempt to exercise free will, but in the naturalist’s indifferent, deterministic universe, free will is an illusion.