essay on american realism

American Realism

Summary of American Realism

The birth of Realism in art is often given a specific time and place - France, 1840 - from whence it spread (and transformed) as a pan-European response to the age of industrialization. It remains, however, an open-ended concept that has taken on a uniquely national bent when applied to American art . What might be generally agreed is that Realism is a tendency whereby the artist in question has either subverted, or overlooked altogether, Academy (or typical orthodox) standards in pursuit of a more "authentic", or "relevant", figurative art. Realist art typically responds to contemporary events and situations, sometimes as a form of social commentary or documentation. Not so much a movement, then, American Realism is a tendency that has traveled the timeline of American history since its birth as an independent country. Indeed, through its various manifestations, Realism has become an important instrument in shaping America's self-identity as a nation.

Key Ideas & Accomplishments

• By most art historians' accounts, John Singleton Copley holds the rank the greatest American painter of the eighteenth century. Known primarily for his portraits, he developed a realist style that captured his sitters, some of them the most important pioneers of the New World, in a naturalistic way and with very fine attention to small detail. Priding himself on his political neutrality, Copley brought a level of objectivity to portraiture that was wanting in even the best examples of his more austere European contemporaries.
• In was an English émigré named Thomas Cole who instigated the rise of America's first school of landscapists. On the one hand, the Hudson River School was captivated by the majesty of the American landscape and its members bought into the European idea of the sublime power of nature. At the same time, the group, who took great national pride in the majesty of their own natural surroundings, began to record the dawning of the industrial age and America's ability to harness this "untamable" force. Overall what they achieved was a fine balance between the realms of realism and illusionism.
• The loose-knit group of New Yorkers, known as The Ashcan School , delivered American art into the twentieth century by countering the soft palettes and flights of colorful splendor associated with the American Impressionists . The Ashcan School believed that an authentic American art could only be achieved through direct experience and by capturing the dynamics of city life on their canvases. Though they were apt to intensify the drama of their pictures through their preference for dark palettes and loose brushstrokes, theirs was a gritty and vital take on the realities of New York street-life at the beginning of the century.
• The combined impact of Great Depression and the Dust Bowl crisis of the 1930s led to the development of national relief programs that included roles for artists and photographers in the worst-affected communities. In the Mid-Western Heartlands a style known as Regionalism emerged. Reviving the traditions of folk art, the Regionalists promoted archetypal American rural subjects that embodied the values of hard work, community, and austerity. The social project was mirrored in cities like New York where the Social Realists were producing figurative and realistic public murals of and for "the workers". The Social Realists insisted that their art be uses as a political "weapon" to be deployed against the perceived ills of American capitalism.
• Following the intervention of Abstract Expressionism , American art renewed its interest in realism in the 1960s. The Photorealists , or Hyperrealists as they were also known, produced paintings that drew heavily on photography. With the photographic image projected onto the canvas, the Photorealists then produced precisely detailed paintings that they then made "hyperreal" by "touching up" with the veneer of an airbrush. Focusing mostly on machinery and objects of industry (cars, trucks, planes, vending machines and so on) and (specifically in the work of Audrey Flack ) current news photography, the Photorealists offered a counter to the rise of Conceptualism and Minimalism .

Key Artists

Overview of American Realism

George Bellows, one of the most prominent members of the New York Ashcan School, declared: "First of all, I am a painter, and a painter gets hold of life - gets hold of something real, of many real things", and when he does that, "that makes him think, and if he thinks out loud he is called a revolutionist".

Artworks and Artists of American Realism

Paul Revere

Artist: John Singleton Copley

Singleton Copley was, by common consent, the greatest American painter of the eighteenth century. His painting of Paul Revere, the silversmith-cum-folk-hero of the American Revolution, predates Revere's historic night-time ride to Lexington on the eve of the revolution that alerted the colonial milia of the approach of British troops (and thus allowing Revolutionary leaders John Handcock and Samuel Adams to escape capture) and reveals him very much as an "ordinary" artisan. On the one hand, Copley's painting presents an idealized version of Revere's working conditions: the table is too uncluttered and polished to resemble a working bench and the silversmith's clothes and hands are washed clean. On the other, it is, by the standards of the day, a naturalistic portrait. At a time when it was the norm for sitters to present to the artist/public in their "Sunday best", Revere is shown in his working clothes, a feature that hides his middle-class status. For instance, his shirt is fashioned from plain white cotton, he is missing and formal neckwear (such as a cravat) and his waistcoat is unbuttoned. Nor does Revere wear a jacket or wig, the latter especially being a staple status symbol for a person of Revere's social standing. Although Copley prided himself on his political neutrality, his portrait of Revere carried with it more than a hint of political symbolism. A silversmith would craft many objects - buckles, cutlery, tankards, sugar tongs and so on - yet the fact that he is pictured with a teapot seems like a political statement. The year before the painting was produced, the British government has passed to so-called Townsend Act which imposed taxes on tea (in addition to some other imported goods). Tea had become a divisive commodity and led, ultimately, to the Boston Tea Party of 1773 in which radicals raided vessels in Boston Harbor and threw the cargo of tea overboard.

Oil on canvas - Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm - The Oxbow

Artist: Thomas Cole

Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School, supported the 19 th century notion that God's divine presence was embodied in nature. And, perhaps because he was an Englishman, Cole was better placed (as an outsider) to appreciate the American wilderness as central to American national identity. On the left diagonal, we see the evidence of the sublime (an artistic trope that expresses the "sublime" power of God through nature) as a thunderstorm of biblical proportions pours down angrily on a lightening-struck tree. While the left half of the composition is taken up by thick verdant woodland, deep greens and looming darkness, as our eye crosses the river, the image shifts in emphasis. Now we see a more pastoral scene rendered in lighter colors that speak of man's mastery over the fearsome landscape. This gives the painting its unique contemporaneous theme of manifest destiny. Art historian Edward Lucie-Smith described this work as "an effort to marry a sensibility based on Claude Lorrain and the European ideal landscape to the recalcitrant facts of American nature". This is shown most emphatically to the right of the canvas where the grasses have been tamed by modern advances in agriculture. It was important for art of the time to represent farms and homesteads as a way of demonstrating how the pioneers had begun to own this majestic land of theirs. Furthermore, Cole wanted to show how the beauty of America's countryside could compete with the best that Europe had to offer. He wrote in 1835: "There are those [Europeans] who through ignorance or prejudice strive to maintain that American scenery possesses little that is interesting or truly beautiful [...] Let such persons shut themselves up in their narrow shell of prejudice - I hope they are few - and the community increasing in intelligence will know better how to appreciate the treasures of their own country".

Oil on canvas - The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Gross Clinic

Artist: Thomas Eakins

Thomas Eakins was one of the founders and teachers of Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts. Born and raised in Philadelphia, which at the time was the cultural capital of America, he showed an early talent for drawing. Working primarily in the second half of the 19 th century, Eakins' style renounced idealized and romantic depictions and advocated instead for precise investigation of the human form and the natural world. He was fascinated with photography and made photographic studies of humans and animals in motion and thus pioneering a painterly style based on direct observation. The Gross Clinic celebrated the work of local physician Dr Samuel David Gross, who was instructing doctors on new surgical techniques as they removed a dead piece of bone from a young man's leg. Inspired by Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp (1632), Eakins' bloody composition is one of two parts. The top renders spectators in the theatre in soft, impressionistic detail. Hidden in the dark, some are busy working, others are clearly bored. In the foreground, however, Eakins's use of light picks out the important details such as the look of instruction on Dr Gross's face, the white cloths soaked in liquid anesthesia (ether), the blood on his and his colleagues' fingers, and the surgical tools (many of which Gross invented himself). The juxtaposition of dark and light; pain and boredom; bloody flesh and metal, represent the tension at the heart of American Realist painting: the new world is catching up with the old and a nation of wilderness is becoming an industrial superpower. However, many critics protested at the visceral nature of the work which upset Eakins's standing in Philadelphia society. Nevertheless, the work stands as a record (and celebration) of the great leaps and innovations in science and medicine coming out of America in the late nineteenth century.

Oil on canvas - The Philadelphia Museum of Art & the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts

Stag at Sharkey's

Artist: George Bellows

Associated primarily with the rise of New York's Ashcan School, Bellows is perhaps best known for his sports-themed works, and especially, a series of brutal boxing paintings. His signature work, Stag at Sharkey , involved an illegal bout which he was drawn to, not for the sport (which he claimed not to understand), but for its raw brutality. Amateur boxing bouts were illegal in New York and so contests such as this had to take place in privately run clubs. Tom "Sailor" Sharkey, a US Navy veteran, and former boxer himself, founded his eponymous club as a venue for men seeking to watch and/or participate in amateur boxing bouts. When an outsider came to compete, they were given temporary membership to the club and were known as "stags". Bellows, whose studio was located across the street from the venue, was able to watch fights and produced several preparatory sketches. Two boxers are locked in a hold as they compete in the center of a ring. The rivals are represented through a pyramidal composition. Looking for potential rule infringements, meanwhile, a referee is hunched closely to the right of the fighters. A cigar-chewing ringside spectator turns towards the painter, imploring him (and the viewer), through his pointing finger, to give our full attention to the fight at hand. Indeed, Bellows separates the fighters from their surroundings, not only through the ringside ropes, but through the bold, but naturalistic, use of color and shading. The realist quality of the painting is evident not just in the choice of subject matter and setting, but also in Bellows's skill at rendering the intense physicality - the interlocked, sinewy bodies of the boxers - and energy - the rumbustious crowd and the urgent (futile?) intervention of the referee - by means of fluent impressionistic brushstrokes. Many have read this painting, one of the most iconic of twentieth century American art and as the perfect analogy for the trials and tribulations of working-class urban survival in the early years of the century.

Oil on canvas - The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio

American Gothic

Artist: Grant Wood

Grant Wood, one of America's foremost Regionalist painters, made a name for himself painting archetypal rural subjects that embodied the values of hard work, community, and austerity. He shot to fame almost overnight and captured the public's imagination with this and other works that celebrated a version of American identity through clarity and precision. Wood produced this work while visiting the small town of Eldon in his native Iowa. Inspired by the little wood farmhouse, with a single oversized window made in a style called Carpenter Gothic, Wood said he "imagined American Gothic people with their faces stretched out long to go with this American Gothic house". His models were his dentist and his younger sister, Nan (though many read them as man and wife). Both are dressed in conservative dress and painted in dark, stern colors. The pitchfork in the centre - which was an old-fashioned tool even in the 1930s - dominates the frame. While the subject matter was distinctly midwestern, the highly detailed, polished style and the rigid frontality of the two figures came from the realist Flemish Renaissance art which Wood had studied during his travels to Europe a decade before. Despite being an overtly realist work, Wood's painting has in fact been met with confusion and ambiguity. Some commentators are still unsure as to whether this painting celebrates the subjects or satirizes them. Does it represent the present moment? Or is it nostalgic? Art historian Edward Lucie-Smith said: "The Regionalist movement, was thought of celebratory by its participants, a revival of the values of the Midwestern heartland of America - this in spite of the fact that the Midwesterners of the time were often resistant to, and sometimes deeply offended by, the way in which leading Regionalists chose to depict them". Wood himself did not offer much by way of clarity when his painting was displayed at the Art Institute of Chicago (winning him a $300 prize). He said simply that it represented the "types" he had known all his life, and that he had not intended to ridicule them by pointing to faults such as "fanaticism and false taste". However one chooses to read it, the painting has become iconic and is one of America's best known and well-loved works.

Oil on canvas - The Art Institute of Chicago

Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California

Artist: Dorothea Lange

An image as iconic as Wood's American Gothic , Migrant Mother is one of the most widely recognized photographs in documentary history and shows a woman in a migrant pea-pickers camp during the Dust Bowl crisis. Their faces turned away from the camera, her two young children cling to their mother as she holds an infant, swaddled in a worn blanket, and looks pensively into the far distance. The photograph was originally captioned "Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California" and was one of several images that Lange took of Florence Owens Thompson and her family in their makeshift camp. The image was in fact part of a documentary project, supported by the Resettlement Administration, and subsequently renamed the Farm Security Administration, where Roy Stryker, head of the photographic division, hired photographers, "to document the American way of life". Lange's photographs appeared in a 1936 issue of the San Francisco News , following a story highlighting the near starvation conditions in the camp, and contributed to the success of the relief effort. Stryker felt Lange's image symbolized the entire project. As he said, Migrant Mother "has all the suffering of mankind in her but all of the perseverance too. A restraint and a strange courage. You can see anything you want to in her. She is immortal". Reproduced in textbooks, postage stamps, political campaigns, and museum displays, the image has become not only a symbol of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl crisis, but also, as historian Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites put it, "a template for images of want" and a "powerful statements on behalf of democracy's promise of social and economic justice".

Gelatin silver print - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Artist: Edward Hopper

Edward Hopper, a careful, thoughtful, artist who would observe his scenes for hours before putting brush to canvas, created more than 800 paintings, watercolors and prints, as well as numerous drawings and illustrations. He depicted the realities of modern alienation through images of people whose faces were often so still they seem arrested by time. As art historian Avis Berman wrote: "Each canvas represented a long, morose gestation spent in solitary thought". Nighthawks has become one of the best known images of twentieth-century art. Inspired by a restaurant on New York's Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet, the image - with its carefully constructed composition and total lack of narrative - has a timeless, universal quality that transcends its particular locale. The large windows of the diner show four individuals, sitting together but alone at a countertop under fluorescent lighting. They are seemingly sat in silence, lost in thought at an unspecified time of night. If there is conversation, the viewer is not invited. Of Nighthawks Hopper said: "unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city". This piece embodies the Americana that much of the Realist art of the time displayed; the coffee, the cigar advert, the cash register, the salt and pepper shaker and napkin holders all invite the viewer to share in their lived experience of the anonymous diners. It was signifiers such as these that prompted some critics to associate Hopper with the Ashcan School (although at that suggestion the artist himself baulked, "I've never painted an ash can in my life" he said). As art historian Dr Beth Harris said: "There is an implication that we are alone. It almost starts to feel frightening. But you can imagine light around it at another time of the day. It's now eerily silent. We just want to know - what are these figures doing here". This echoed the heightened feeling of alienation during wartime America. The cities emptied under the cloud of anxiety hanging over the nation.

This is Harlem

Artist: Jacob Lawrence

African American artist Jacob Lawrence, an alumnus of various New York Art schools, was a member of the New Deal, Federation Art Project. He was also a part of the Harlem Renaissance - a New York movement that was committed collectively to representing the lived experience and history of African Americans but without a single unifying style - Lawrence combined elements of Social Realism and semi-abstraction in compositions that used a vivid palette to create compelling community narratives. Lawrence wanted to bring the Black experience into the canon, after realizing from a young age that his education neglected African American art history. Lawrence painted from his everyday life and in This Is Harlem we see a colorful street scene represented through advertising hoardings, telephone cables, a community church, and crowded residential blocks. Through the middle of the canvas march city-dwellers, hands pushed into pockets as they hunch from the cold. The picture plane is flattened and the perspective is off kilter - a human dwarfs a passing truck while a dog out-spans a car, for example. In comparison to other Realists working in the city, Lawrence brought a greater sense of celebration and spirituality to his work. Harlem was a locus for music, literature, theatre and visual arts and this work pays tribute to the creative lifeblood of the neighborhood; from the figures cavorting on a street corner, the signage ("Dance", "Bar", "Beauty Shoppe"), the color of the church's stained glass windows and the posters/paintings hung on the sidewalk. Lawrence's style and subject matter reflected his desire to connect with a broad audience; the bold colors and detailed figuration were designed to promote the Harlem narrative. As curator Jacquelyn Serwer said, Lawrence wanted to make sure "that important aspects of African American history were documented in a way that could be appreciated and understood by a very broad audience".

Oil on canvas - Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington

Kennedy Motorcade

Artist: Audrey Flack

As Flack moved from her early career gestural abstraction and self-portraiture into Photorealism, she turned her gaze away from the self onto the realities of the outside world. She achieved the photo-real effect by projecting, tracing and re-colouring real historical events onto over-size canvases. She would often use an airbrush as a means of bringing the burnished gleam of advertising to her subject matter thus lending her art a hyperrealistic quality. Flack was one of several artists who moved beyond the introspection of abstraction towards the re-staging of popular imagery and culture. However, in the 1960s, and even in the wake of Pop Art, it was still considered problematic for serious artists to directly copy photographs. John and Jackie Kennedy are seen here leaving Dallas airport on November 22, 1963, just moments before his assassination. Flack wrote: "People were horrified at the subject matter. Everybody is smiling, and, of course, you know that one moment later Kennedy is going to get shot". The couple sit in the back of a convertible car surrounded by security and airport staff, waiting to make their ill-fated parade through downtown Dallas. Flack reproduced this scene from a color newspaper photograph of the Kennedys published at the time. Caught squinting in the glare of the Texan sun, the Kennedy's, accompanied by state governor John Connally, appear relaxed and happy, unaware of the momentous historical tragedy which is about to unfold. Whatever one's view on the meaning of "authentic" art, Flack's Kennedy Motorcade ranks as an innovative example of a Photorealist style that invites the spectator to reflect on the ontology of original art.

Oil on canvas - Private Collection

Artist: Duane Hanson

As one of the most popular American sculptors of the twentieth century, Hanson first achieved acclaim during the 1970s through a hyperrealistic style that saw his sculptures likened to the painters of the Photorealism movement. He is associated specifically with a series of uncanny life-size models of working-class American citizens which he recreated in painted polyvinyl, fiberglass resin, and bronze. Hanson's sculptures are celebrated for their meticulous attention to detail which include such features as real hair, fingernails, raised veins, and various skin blemishes. Dressing his figures in workers uniforms, or clothes bought from thrift stores, he helped to further define the status of his subjects through the appropriation of various found props. Hanson's hyperrealist works often trick the eye and the artist has spoken of his fascination with tromp l'oeil painters such as John Frederick Peto. But this knowledge rather belies the fact that his sculptures also offer a more reflective experience through their realist qualities. As he said, "In the turmoil of everyday life, we too seldom become aware of one another. In the quiet moments in which you observe my work, maybe you will recognise the universality of all people". Hanson was not trying to trick his audience into thinking his figures were somehow real, however. His intention was rather to illicit a sense of connectivity between these everyday American "types" and the people who came to the gallery to view them. Some critics still read his pieces as satire because there was a humorous quality to be had by (dis)placing his figures in surroundings (the gallery) that were unfamiliar to them. But humor notwithstanding, Hanson's intentions always remained true to his empathetic humanist worldview.

Polychromed bronze, with accessories - Van de Weghe Fine Art, New York

Michelle Obama

Artist: Amy Sherald

Sherald's art focuses on African American cultural history and specifically the representation of the African American body in black and white photography. Her work is, in the words of art critic William S. Smith, part of a move in contemporary American Realist art to "narrate histories of struggle, ennoble quotidian experiences, and project a better future without lapsing into idealism". Sherald adopts a monochrome technique, known as grisaille (shaded grays), to render the former First Lady's skin tone. On the one hand, this strategy was a means of challenging the viewer's assumptions about color as race, but the grisaille technique was also a direct reference to Sherald's childhood when she learned of her grandmother through studying old black and white photographs in which her skin was represented in like tones of monochrome. Indeed, Sherald described her paintings as a "meditation on photography". The Smithsonian says of the painting: "Mrs. Obama's unnaturally colored skin asks us to consider both her race and her humanity. While the use of gray in lieu of more natural skin tones reduces the reference to her race, the blunt removal also draws attention to her skin color, highlighting her racial identity. The gray tones, in particular, reference nineteenth-century photographic traditions, wherein the emerging photographic medium allowed free African Americans to celebrate themselves and craft their own unique (and positive) identities. Whereas the grand portraiture traditions of painting and sculpture were largely out of reach, photography was an accessible medium". The other dominant feature of the portrait is Mrs. Obama's personal choice of dress. Designed by Michelle Smith, and looking beyond its nod towards 1960s Op Art, "Sherald recognized its visual affinities with the quilts of Gee's Bend, Alabama. The quilts of Gee's Bend, a remote black community of the descendants of former slaves, are bold and improvisational, and reference the independence and resourcefulness of the African American experience".

Oil on linen - National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Beginnings and Development

Now ranked as the first internationally recognized American painter, Benjamin West is chiefly associated with academic style of Neoclassicism (and, in his later career, Romanticism). Indeed, his most famous historical narratives, such as his career defining Death of General Wolfe (1770), were designed specifically to elicit an emotional response in the viewer by inviting them to sympathize with noble human acts (such as General Wolfe's self-sacrifice at the Battle of Quebec). But his Neoclassical compositions were somewhat atypical, not just because he focused on contemporary subjects and events, but also because West introduced finely observed contemporary details into his tableaus such as clothing and weaponry. For his part, Copley adopted a direct approach to his sitters. It was a style that presented a fierce challenge to the more austere Academy portraiture and gave rise to a series of naturalistic portraits that have become the definitive visual record of the dignity and valour of New World pioneers including John Hancock (1765), Paul Revere (1768), and Samuel Adams (1772).

Blending idealism with realism, The Hudson River School (1826-70), whose members - including Asher B. Durand, George Inness , Frederic Edwin Church , Albert Bierstadt and John Frederick Kensett - were drawn to (what was at that time) the unique upper New York state wilderness, is considered the first unified American art movement. Taking their lead from the spectacular landscape paintings of the English émigré Thomas Cole , the "second generation" Hudson School (from 1848) imported the influence of European Romanticism , the idea of the sublime , and adopted the allegory that the magnificent American landscape, especially so when brought to life on vast canvases, symbolized the limitless possibilities for a fledgling American nation. This style was however tempered by a pronounced realist element that emerged in the Group's collective commitment to Naturalism which was most evident in the artists' meticulous attention to the details in nature.

Bingham, meanwhile, was the foremost midwestern landscapists of the first half of the 19 th century. His depictions of Missouri frontier life (during the 1830s and 1840s, Missouri remained at the edge of the American frontier and a point of departure for explorers and pioneers heading west), in images such as Fur Traders Descending the Missouri (1845), created a representative, if unabashedly idealized, picture of the day-to-day working life in and around America's midwestern waterways.

Homer and Eakins

Winslow Homer is regarded by many as the greatest nineteenth century American painter. He is best known perhaps for a series of raw gestural works that depicted man's struggle against the mighty forces of the sea. Prior to this, however, he had developed a style of Realism that set precedents for American art. In October 1861 he was dispatched to Virginia as a war artist/correspondent for the journal Harper's Weekly . His civil war paintings, such as The Army at Potomac - A Sharp-Shooter on Picket Duty (1862) and The Veteran in a New Field (1863) reflected his first-hand experience of the war and its human impact. Indeed, Homer's war paintings were executed with a detached objectivity that avoided the romanticized and heroic battle scenes that were a staple of history paintings.

Homer's works mirrored in fact the "new" war documentary photography being produced simultaneously by Matthew Brady and his team (including Timothy O'Sullivan, Alexander Gardner, and George N. Barnard). Collectively Homer and Brady's team provided a definitive documentary record of the American Civil War. Once the war had ended, Homer turned his attention to everyday rural scenes of women and school-children at work and at play, and to hunting scenes. In the mid-1870s, Homer returned to Virginia where he turned his observational eye (and brush) this time towards the daily lives of former slaves during the first decade of Emancipation. Meanwhile, Homer's contemporary, the domestic portraitist and painter of sporting scenes (such as swimming and wrestling), Thomas Eakins , produced paintings with an almost scientific detachment. Eakins was one of the first American artists to embrace the medium of photography and he used it as a tool on which construct his compositions. He sought to create an anatomically accurate human forms and would be a key influence on the Ashcan School that carried the torch of American Realism into the twentieth century.

The Post-War West

Jonathan Eastman Johnson (aka Jonathan Eastman) was the eminent American genre painter on the late nineteenth century (a fact acknowledged as he was the co-founder of the Metropolitan Museum of Art) who made his name both as a portraitist (his sitters included Abraham Lincoln, Nathanial Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) and a painter of everyday American life. He had studied at Germany's Düsseldorf Academy and in The Hague during the 1850s and his work owed an obvious debt to the seventeenth century Dutch masters (hence his moniker: "the American Rembrandt "). Johnson's painting presented a clear departure for American Realism in that it helped widen the definition of what it meant to be an "ordinary American".

His everyday vignettes were not idealized or romanticized while his paintings of life in the West dealt head on with the sensitive issues of slavery and poverty. Indeed, in 1859 his New York exhibition, Negro Life in the South, caused disquiet amongst audience members. His images of the leisure activities of a group of slaves proved a sensation at a time when the injustices of slavery were at the top of the political agenda. Such was the success of the exhibition Johnson was made Associate to the National Academy of Design. In subsequent decades Johnson turned to themes of national life, painting humble interior scenes near his second home on the island of Nantucket. (In his later career he gave up genre painting and returned to portraiture for which he received handsome fees.)

Post War Frontier life

Born in 1864, Charles Marion Russell (aka Kid Russell), would produce dynamic Cowboy Art based on his intimate knowledge and experience of frontier life in and around Montana. Raised in a comfortable middle-class home in St. Louis, Missouri, Russell was an avid reader of dime-store westerns and spent his childhood daydreaming of life as a cowboy. Concerned with his poor school record, and his frequent bouts of truancy, Charlie's parents sent their 15-year-old son on a summer vacation to a ranch in Montana in the hope he would learn some discipline. He never came home. Coinciding with the western cattle boom, Russell had realized his dream by taking on a two-year apprenticeship as a horse wrangler. As a way of passing his down time, Kid Russell would sketch scenes of cattle drives and model horses from wax.

Russell made friends of the Blackfeet, Arapaho, Kootenai and Crow tribes before, in 1888, living with the Kainai Nation (aka The Bloods), with whom he hunted, learned their language, legends and customs and incorporated their tribal symbols and emblems in his painting. As the art historian Arthur Hoeber put it, Russell "paints the West that has passed from an intimate personal knowledge of it; for he was in the midst of it all, and he has the tang of its spirit in his blood".

The Ashcan School (1900-1915)

The term "ash can art" was first used around 1916 and is attributed to the artist Art Young. The label, Ashcan School , and its later incarnation, The Eight, has been applied to a number of Philadelphia and New York painters (and even photographers such as Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine) working in the first two decades on the twentieth century. While there is a lack of agreement on who "belonged" legitimately to this rather informal group, Robert Henri , George Bellows , John Sloan , William J. Glackens , George Luks and Everett Shinn , and later, Edwin Lawson, Maurice Prendergast and Arthur B. Davis are considered amongst its principle players. Though they were committed to representing the realities of everyday urban life, the artist's believed in freedom of expression and the idea that artists should be free to exhibit their works without pressure from academies and awards juries.

Prior to the emergence of the Ashcan School, the plein air style was the dominant trend in American painting. With their light palettes and loose brushwork, the likes of William Merritt Chase and Mary Cassatt carried the torch for the romantic idyls that became known as American Impressionism . Inspired chiefly by Henri - who worked off the maxim "art for life's sake" - the Ashcan artists set themselves apart from the Impressionists . The Group concerned itself with subject matter centered on the dynamism of metropolitan street-life. Featuring scenes of sports bars, alleyways, movie theaters, boxing arenas, and the daily lives of prostitutes, immigrants and working-class communities, the School's loose style borrowed variously from the traditions of seventeenth century Spanish and Dutch, and nineteenth century French, realism. But it was perhaps George Bellows , taught by Henri and influenced by Eakins, who emerged as the true progenitor of American Urban Realism. His oeuvre reveals the artist's readiness to tackle a range of urban subjects and to experiment with new color and compositional arrangements.

Precisionism and Regionalism

The American avant-garde took off proper following the International Exhibition of Modern Art (known as the Armory Show since it was staged in vast US National Guard armories) of 1913. It was a landmark event in the history of American modernism, giving rise to what was considered the first truly homegrown avant-garde movement: Precisionism . Although Precisionists such as Paul Strand , Charles Scheeler , Georgia O'Keeffe , Niles Spencer and Ralston Crawford took their lead from the distilled geometric forms of Cubism , Futurism and Orphism , their subject matter, which included city streets, skyscrapers, rail networks, steel works and grain depots, saw them tackle much of the same subject matter as the Ashcan School (indeed, Edward Hopper has been claimed variously by historians for both groups).

However, once the Great Depression and the Dustbowl crisis had taken hold, many American artists challenged the "self-indulgences" of semi-abstraction by producing a narrative art that spoke directly to the folk living in the American Heartlands. The best-known of the Regionalists were Thomas Hart Benton , John Steuart Curry , and Grant Wood . They produced art that reflected the hardships of provincial American life (although the sincerity of their work has since been the cause of some debate amongst art historians). Collectively, the Regionalists were associated with an authentic local art that overlapped the traditions of American folk with even Old Master paintings. Curry found favor producing idealized and nostalgic, depictions of community and religious life while Wood produced American Gothic (1930) one of the most iconic American artworks in the country's history.

Among the best-known Regionalists was Doris (Emrick) Lee. Indeed, she emerged as one of the most successful female artists of the Depression era. Lee's tableau of women preparing a Thanksgiving banquet drew national headlines when it won the prestigious Logan Purchase Prize in 1935. The theme of Thanksgiving tied in with the Regionalist focus on rural life customs which Lee executed in style reminiscent of American folk art. Works such as this were hugely popular with those still living in the grip of the Great Depression but Josephine Logan (donor of the Logan prize) condemned Lee's "exaggerated" style. Indeed, the following year Logan founded the conservative "Society for Sanity in Art" in protest. The Society opposed all forms of modernism and any mode of art that deviated from academy standards. Branches of the Society established themselves all around the country and artists associated with the group included: Haig Patigian, William Winthrop Ward, Florence Louise Bryant, Henry (Percy) Gray and Frank Montague Moore.

American Social Realism

Overlapping with Regionalism, was the urban American Social Realist movement . It was in fact a global movement that was particularly prevalent in Communist and/or Socialist countries (such as the Russia, China, and Mexico) where state sponsored art was used to the ends of state propaganda. Socialist Realism was/is a figurative and realistic art in which the lives of "the workers" and the politically disenfranchised are celebrated in an act of social solidarity. The Social Realists rejected avant-gardism as being elitist and therefore lacking inof social resonance. For these artists, art should serve as a political weapon in the fight against capitalist systems and, in other instances, to attack the advance of international fascism.

The American Social Realists objected to the sentimentality and national stereotypes they saw in Regionalism and, in New York (the bedrock of American leftist politics), the Fourteenth Street Group formed, by Kenneth Hayes Miller, championed the working men and women of the city. The sense of group activity was echoed in the collective actions of the artists who joined pickets, protested vocally against social injustices, and made demands for permanent recognition by the government. Comprising, amongst others, the Russian -born Soyer brothers (Isaac, Raphael, and Moses), Isabel Bishop, and Reginald Marsh, the group found poetry in the messiness of quotidian city living. William Gropper and Ben Shahn, meanwhile, took Social Realism to a more overtly political level with works that incorporated a note of caricature. Jacob Lawrence , meanwhile, formed part of the Harlem Renaissance movement . As part of a cultural movement that did not prescribe a realist style (or any one style for that matter), Lawrence combined elements of Social Realism with abstraction in narrative works that reflected the Harlem neighborhood's collective commitment to creating visual stories of the lived African American experience and its history. By the 1940s, the rise of totalitarian governments, especially in Russia, saw Social Realism in America condemned as politically problematic. In New York especially, it would yield to the rise of Abstract Expressionism and all it came to symbolize about life in the "land of the free".

Concepts and Styles

Realism has a long legacy in painting and it is within this domain that it is (rightly) most regularly discussed. But as a concept, American Realism has extended its influence beyond the canvas and, despite the ascendency of abstract and conceptual art, it has continued to attract visual artists who are, or have become disillusioned, with the "difficulty" of avant-gardism.

Some of the earliest representations of American identity in sculpture can be attributed to Frederic Remington and his bronze Cowboy sculptures. His famous Broncho Buster (1895), for instance, was admired for its "frozen moment-in-time" rendering of a cowboy astride a bucking horse and he became well known for his small-scale works depicting the lives of frontiersmen and Native Americans. Following the Great Depression, meanwhile, some 17,000 sculptures were produced under the New Deal Works Progress Administration . Roosevelt's New Deal Recovery saw investment in public art that both provided employment for craftsmen, and cultural identity for towns and cities across the nation.

George Segal became well-known in the early 1960s for his life-size sculptures made of orthopaedic bandages soaked in white plaster (although in his later career he was known to dabble with color). His figures were cast form friends, family members and neighbors and were often displayed in public places like street corners, public benches and tables and train stations. Associated initially with the rise of Pop Art , his sculptures overlapped the line between popular culture and fine art with his own working-class New York upbringing influencing his interest in people intersecting in public social spaces. However, his sculptures - a style he referred to as "literal Cubism" - saw him discussed as more readily as a realist. Indeed, his ghost-like characters celebrated the mundane nature of everyday urban living and often carried with them the themes of boredom and isolation. Performance artist and art theorist Allan Kaprow said of Segal's figures that "They are almost real because they have substance and a name".

With funds supplied by the Federal Art Project, the Regionalists and other artists complimented their canvas paintings with a series of murals. In total, it is estimated that these artists produced some 2,500 murals between them. The mural represented the democratization of art, freeing it from exclusive galleries, and putting art on the street ("where it belonged") for everybody to enjoy. With a background in set design giving him experience of creating art on a large scale, Thomas Hart Benton was perhaps the best-known muralist of the Regionalists. His America Today murals for the New School for Social Research in Greenwich Village depicted life in different regions of the United States: the South, the Midwest, the West and New York. Even after Realism had given way to Abstract Expressionism , he went on to produce murals on the theme of the American Heartland in Chicago, Indiana, and Missouri.

Benton was the most cosmopolitan of his peers. Having studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, he moved to France where, before his permanent return to America in 1911, he mixed with the Parisian avant-garde and this influence showed in his fluid, sculpted figures. But it was the scale and grandeur of his murals that most ignited the public imagination. The mural for the Harry S. Truman Library, for instance, was delivered in his characteristic "semi-expressionist quasi-folksy realism" (as one critic described it). Benton rued: "If I make a tiny error in an Indian's headdress [...] or a rifle, people come down on me like a ton of bricks. They never criticize the artistic quality one way or another, but the historical detail must be absolutely accurate".

Photography

The advent of photography in the mid-nineteenth century had a profound influence on art and is cited by many historians as the device that effectively liberated the artist from the "obligation" of representing the world realistically (and hence giving birth proper to modernism). In America, the first and most well-known documentary project began in 1861 when Matthew Brady, hitherto a renowned New York photographic portraitist, brought together a team, including Timothy O'Sullivan, Alexander Gardner, and George N. Barnard, to document the American Civil War. Subsequently, Sullivan, with other photographers including William Henry Jackson, began working in 1868 for the U.S. Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories, creating the first comprehensive conservation documentary of the American West.

Moving into the twentieth century, the combined impact of Great Depression and the Dust Bowl in the 1930s led to the development of new relief programs, including providing artists and photographers with jobs in the worst affected communities. Roy Stryker, head of the Resettlement Administration (later, the Farm Security Administration) hired leading photographers including Dorothea Lange , Gordon Parks , and Walker Evans to introduce, as he said, "America in Americans". The project resulted in over a quarter-million images that were celebrated both as compelling portrayals of ordinary and often anonymous Americans and for their unsentimental depictions of poverty. Social Documentary became so established that it developed its own sub-genres, such as (following Lange's iconic Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California (1936)) the "Madonna and child" trope that showed a self-sacrificing mother caring for her suffering children.

The Still Life

Influenced by seventeenth-century Dutch and German painters, American still lifes from the latter half of the nineteenth-century often employed the trompe-l'oeil (illusion of reality) method. These works were hung, not in galleries, but rather in business premises and taverns. Their theme was typically masculine, with the so called "bachelor still lifes" featuring images of weaponry, cash, smoking, drinking and hunting. Artists such as Raphaelle Peale, William M.Harnett, John F. Peto and John Haberle were quickly forgotten after their death; their work not given the respect accorded the best landscapists of the period. But the canvases have an important place in the history of American Realism. Although dismissed as novelties by the critics, the trompe-l'oeil paintings were very popular with the public in their time and, when they were re-evaluated by later generations, they commanded a new respect. Indeed, in the 1970s and 1980s, Photorealists such as Ralph Goings and Audrey Flack produced precisely-rendered trompe-l'oeil effects in paintings that showed elements of Americana with such accuracy they were at first glance hard to distinguish from photographs.

Later Developments - After American Realism

The 1940s and 1950s saw a seismic shift in direction for American Art. The rise of Abstract Expressionism saw all forms of figuration dismissed as passe . As the political climate changed domestically and internationally, Realism suddenly seemed terribly outmoded. Abstract Expressionism was seen as a symbol of creative leadership in the fine arts that matched the political and cultural supremacy America had achieved in the Post-War years. A handful of Realists stood their ground, however. From 1943, the Magical Realists began producing paintings that were realist in style if not content. Influenced by European Surrealism and German Neue Sachlichkeit , artists such as Peter Blume, Paul Cadmus , Jared French, and George Tooker adopted a counter position to Abstract Expressionism. Indeed, in the 1950s, led by Raphael Soyer , a group of artists including Hopper, Shahn, Bishop, Leon Kroll and Yasuo Kuniyoshi lobbied museum directors in defense of their art and championed human qualities in painting.

Later, two artists offered a further antidote to the dominance of Abstract Expressionism: Andrew Wyeth and Norman Rockwell . Wyeth's bleak images, which were heavily influenced by photography, took ordinal subjects and imbued them with a psychological tension. Rockwell, of course, became the nation's most popular artists and, for that "crime", was widely dismissed by critics (including the infamous Clement Greenberg ) for his sentimental and nationalistic Saturday Evening Post covers. However, Rockwell, especially in his later career paintings for LOOK magazine, was given to promote "causes" such as the freedom of speech and the Civil Rights movement. In The Problem We All Live With (1964), for instance, he pictured Ruby Nell Bridges, a six year old African American girl, being escorted to her newly desegregated New Orleans school on her first day by four US Marshals. Rockwell had prepared the image by taking photographs of legs walking in order to capture the patterns of folds and creases in the pants of the Marshalls.

Rockwell in fact traveled to Russia (and other European destinations) with the intent of studying Socialist Realism . There he made sketches of Russian school children which he used later for a LOOK magazine cover painted in a photo-realistic style. Indeed, Photorealism (or Hyperrealism or Super-realism) saw other 1960s artists developing a more highly polished and exaggerated style to depict real and still life. Artists such as Chuck Close, Malcolm Morley, Charles Bell, Ralph Goings and Robert Bechtle projected photographs onto canvas allowing images to be replicated with precision and accuracy. The 1960s also saw a new group of New York artists return to figuration in direct defiance to the prevailing popularity of Abstract Expressionism. Artists such as Jane Freilicher , Alex Katz , Leland Bell , Nell Blaine , William Bailey and Larry Rivers all produced works that earned the label: Contemporary Realism .

In 2020, the periodical Art in America devoted an issue to the theme of "Realism and Revivalism". In his editorial, William S. Smith spoke of a "resurgence of figurative painting" that was both "pluralistic and contentious" and encompassed a cadre of young artists ranging from Jordan Casteel and Aliza Nisenbaum to Amy Sherald and Titus Kaphar. He wrote, "contemporary painting has become a vital force within the culture at large" and that "at a moment when there is widespread attention to racial inequities in the United States, figurative artists like these are representing people who have long been excluded from the canon". He adds that "If oil painting is old fashioned, that's exactly the point: the choice of medium is part of an argument about who can be represented in the most time-honored fashion". The likes of Casteel and Nisenbaum, he continued, are, "like their photographer and filmmaker peers [...] recording the profound transformation of labor conditions in the twenty-first century [and that through] its many revivals and its many guises, realism appears most vital during periods of social change".

Useful Resources on American Realism

• American Impressionism and Realism: The Painting of Modern Life, 1885-1915 By Barbara Weinberg
• American Realism Our Pick By Edward Lucie Smith
• From Hopper to Rothko: America's Road to Modern Art By Ortud Westheider
• The Hudson River School: Nature and the AmericanVision By Linda S. Ferber
• Ten Jaw Dropping Works Of Hyperrealism By Lily Cichanowicz
• Social realism: Art as a Weapon (Critical studies in American art) By David Shapiro and Irving Perkins
• Michelle Obama Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery / 2018
• The Mystery of Amy Sherald's Portrait of Michelle Obama By Doreen St. Felix / The New Yorker / February 13, 2018
• Realism and Revival By William S. Smith / Art in America / September 1, 2020
• Charles Marion Russell Biography By Arthur Hoeber / November 19, 2019
• The Ashcan School By Barbara Weinberg / The Metropolitan Museum of Art / April 2010
• An Introduction To American Realism In 12 Works By Courtney Stanley / Culture Trip / October 14, 2016
• I'm Obsessed with the Pet Squirrel in This Peculiar Early-American Portrait By Sarah Dotson / September 10, 2019 / Artsy
• Five Jacob Lawrence Paintings Depicting Powerful Moments from African American History By Emma Taggert / My Modern Met / January 2021
• George Segal as Realist By Robert Pincus-Witten / Summer 1967
• Hopper: The Supreme American Realist of the 20th-Century By Avis Berman / The Smithsonian Magazine / July 2007
• How the Groundbreaking Realism Movement Revolutionized Art History By Kelly Richman-Abdou / My Modern Met / July 8, 2018
• Thomas Eakins's "The Gross Clinic" May Be the Most Important American Painting By Alina Cohen / PAFA / November 23, 2019
• The Story of American Realism By Patina Lee / Widewalls / June 19, 2016
• Stieglitz, The Steerage By Dr Kris Belden-Adams / Kahn Academy
• American Realism Art History with Travis Lee Clark Our Pick
• Modern American Realism Highlights from the Smithsonian's Sara Roby Foundation Collection
• Silent movie showing Thomas Hart Benton painting the mural "Independence and the Opening of the West"
• "The Real Thing:" Modernism and American Painting
• What is Contemporary Realism in Art?
• William Kloss Lecture: Modern American Realism

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Realism and Naturalism

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Realism and Naturalism by John Dudley LAST REVIEWED: 13 January 2022 LAST MODIFIED: 29 August 2012 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0059

Variously defined as distinct philosophical approaches, complementary aesthetic strategies, or broad literary movements, realism and naturalism emerged as the dominant categories applied to American fiction of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Included under the broad umbrella of realism are a diverse set of authors, including Henry James, W. D. Howells, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, George Washington Cable, Rebecca Harding Davis, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Hamlin Garland. Often categorized as regionalists or local colorists, many of these writers produced work that emphasized geographically distinct dialects and customs. Others offered satirical fiction or novels of manners that exposed the excesses, hypocrisies, or shortcomings of a culture undergoing radical social change. A subsequent generation of writers, including Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, and Jack London, are most often cited as the American inheritors of the naturalist approach practiced by Emile Zola, whose 1880 treatise Le Roman Experimental applied the experimental methods of medical science to the construction of the novel. Governed by a combination of heredity, environment, and chance, the typical characters of naturalist fiction find themselves constrained from achieving the transcendent goals suggested by a false ideology of romantic individualism. Over the past century, critics and literary historians have alternately viewed realist and naturalist texts as explicit condemnations of the economic, cultural, or ethical deficiencies of the industrialized age or as representations of the very ideological forces they purport to critique. Accordingly, an exploration of these texts raises important questions about the relationship between literature and society, and about our understanding of the “real” or the “natural” as cultural and literary phenomena. Though of little regard in the wake of the New Critics’ emphasis on metaphysics and formal innovation, a revived interest in realism as the American adaptation of an international movement aligned with egalitarian and democratic ideology emerged in the 1960s, as did an effort to redefine naturalist fiction as a more complex form belonging to the broader mainstream of American literary history. More recently, the emergence of deconstructive, Marxist, and new historicist criticism in the 1980s afforded a revised, and often skeptical, reevaluation of realism and naturalism as more conflicted forms, itself defined or constructed by hegemonic forces and offering insight into late-19th- and early-20th-century ideologies of class, race, and gender.

In the wake of Parrington’s attempt to reconcile the rise of realism and naturalism with an essentially romantic tradition ( Parrington 1930 ), interest in the rise of these movements has occurred in waves. In particular, efforts to provide large-scale summaries reflect the attention to social problems in 1960s, and the influence of—and reaction to—post-structuralism and cultural criticism in the 1980s. In all cases, however, comprehensive hypotheses about the nature of realism and naturalism remain grounded, to a large extent, in the political, economic, and cultural history of the late 19th century. Berthoff 1965 , Pizer 1984 , and Lehan 2005 represent attempts to accommodate the horizons established by Parrington’s definition of the study of literary form. Kaplan 1988 , Borus 1989 , and Bell 1993 each make valuable contributions to the new historicist reexamination of naturalism. Murphy 1987 offers one of the few comprehensive accounts of realism within dramatic literature.

Bell, Michael Davitt. The Problem of American Realism: Studies in the Cultural History of a Literary Idea . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Provides compelling readings of the canonical authors, suggesting little common ground beyond the fact that both realism and naturalism explicitly reject the conventional dictates of artistry and dominant notions of style. Unified in their attraction to “reality” as an abstraction, Howells, Twain, James, Norris, Crane, Dreiser, and Jewett each constructed radically unique responses to a common “revolt against style” (p. 115)

Berthoff, Warner. The Ferment of Realism: American Literature, 1884–1919 . New York: Free Press, 1965.

Suggests that realism as a category may be best understood though an examination of practice, rather than through the study of principles or theories. In this light, establishes forceful reading of realist novels as varied statements of outrage and opposition to the increasing materialism, disorder, and perceived moral decay in the years leading up to World War I.

Borus, Daniel H. Writing Realism: Howells, James, and Norris in the Mass Market . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.

Draws on concerns of new historicism, yet emphasizes the process of literary publication and reception itself. Explores Howells, James, and Norris in detail, with some attention to other writers, including compelling discussions of the publishing industry, literary celebrity, and rise of the political novel.

Kaplan, Amy. The Social Construction of American Realism . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Includes a concise summary of earlier critical debates about realism (including and subsuming naturalism) and describes the cultural work in novels of Howells, Wharton, and Dreiser to construct social spaces that contain and defuse class tensions emerging in the late 19th century. Among the more influential new historicist interventions.

Lehan, Richard Daniel. Realism and Naturalism: The Novel in an Age of Transition . Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005.

Resolutely formalist overview of realism and naturalism as literary modes. Describes the philosophical and cultural assumptions that helped shape these movements and traces their development throughout the 20th century. At times polemical in its dismissal of post-structuralist or materialist rereadings (see, for example, Kaplan 1988 ; Howard 1985 or Michaels 1987 , both cited under Philosophy, History, and Form ), nonetheless immensely useful and readable synthesis of key ideas.

Murphy, Brenda. American Realism and American Drama, 1880–1940 . New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

A treatment of realism in American theater, tracing the development of realist ideas about dramatic representation and their subsequent influence on American dramatists of the 20th century, including Eugene O’Neill, Elmer Rice, and others. Addresses the scant attention paid to the theater in the scholarship on realism.

Parrington, Vernon Louis. The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America, 1860–1920 . Vol. 3, Main Currents in American Thought . New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930.

Though left incomplete at Parrington’s death, offers what would become the dominant view of realism and naturalism for much subsequent criticism. Sees these movements as antitheses of idealism represented by the Emersonian tradition, providing a needed corrective to “shoddy romanticism” that threatened to consume the American literary tradition.

Pizer, Donald. Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature . Rev. ed. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984.

Revision of essential 1966 work, offering a comprehensive formal theory of realism and naturalism, linked by adherence to an ethical idealism that informs, restructures, and complicates the diversity of themes and topics, the often bleak subject matter, and the presence of a deterministic worldview. Collects a variety of essays that construct a coherent portrait of the movements and their defining tensions.

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17 Realism Introduction

Amy Berke; Jordan Cofer; and Doug Davis

After the Civil War and toward the end of the nineteenth century, America experienced significant change. With the closing of the Western frontier and increasing urbanization and industrialization , and with the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad and the advent of new communication technologies such as the telegraph, America began to emerge as a more unified nation as it moved into the Industrial Age . As immigration from both Europe and Asia peaked during the last half of the nineteenth century, immigrants provided cheap labor to rising urban centers in the Northeast and eventually in the Midwest. There was a subsequent rise in the middle class for the first time in America, as the economic landscape of the country began to change. The country’s social, political, and cultural landscape began to change as well. Women argued for the right to vote, to own property, and to earn their own living, and, as African-Americans began to rise to social and political prominence, they called for social equality and the right to vote as well. Workers in factories and businesses began to lobby for better working conditions, organizing to create unions. Free public schools opened throughout the nation, and, by the turn of the century, the majority of children in the United States attended school. Throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century, activists and reformers worked to battle injustice and social ills. Within this heady mix of political, economic, social, and cultural change, American writers began to look more to contemporary society and social issues for their writing material, rather than to the distant or fictional past.

The first members of the new generation of writers sought to create a new American literature, one that distinctly reflected American life and values and did not mimic British literary customs. At the same time, these writers turned to the past, toward writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and James Fenimore Cooper, and reacted against their predecessors’ allegiance to the Romantic style of writing which favored the ideal over the real representation of life in fiction. William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and Henry James wrote prolifically about the Realistic method, where writers created characters and plot based on average people experiencing the common concerns of everyday life, and they also produced their own literary masterpieces using this style.

All writers in the Realistic mode shared a commitment to referential narrative. Their readers expected to meet characters that resembled ordinary people, often of the middle class, living in ordinary circumstances, who experienced plausible real-life struggles and who often, as in life, were unable to find resolution to their conflicts. Realists developed these characters by using ordinary speech in dialogue, commensurate to the character’s social class. Often in Realistic stories, characterization and plot became intertwined, as the plot was formed from the exploration of a character working through or reacting to a particular issue or struggle. In other words, character often drove the plot of the story. Characters in Realistic fiction were three-dimensional, and their inner lives were often revealed through an objective, omniscient narrator.

Realists set their fiction in places that actually existed, and they were interested in recent or contemporary life, not in history or legend. Setting in Realistic fiction was important but was not limited to a particular place or region. Realists believed in the accuracy of detail, and, for them, accuracy helped build the “truth” conveyed in the work. The implied assumption for these writers is that “reality” is verifiable, is separate from human perception of it, and can be agreed upon collectively. Finally, Realistic writers believed that the function of the author is to show, not simply tell. The story should be allowed to tell itself with a decided lack of authorial intrusion. Realistic writers attempted to avoid sentimentality or any kind of forced or heavy-handed emotional appeal. The three most prominent theorists and practitioners of American Literary Realism are Mark Twain, often called the comic Realist; William Dean Howells, often termed the social Realist; and Henry James, often characterized as the psychological Realist.

Two earlier literary styles contributed to the emergence of Realism: Local Color and Regionalism . These two sub-movements cannot be completely separated from one another or from Realism itself, since all three styles have intersecting points. However, there are distinct features of each style that bear comparison.

Local Color (1865-1885)

After the Civil War, as the country became more unified, regions of the country that were previously “closed” politically or isolated geographically became interesting to the populace at large. Readers craved stories about eccentric, peculiar characters living in isolated locales. Local Color writing therefore involves a detailed setting forth of the characteristics of a particular locality, enabling the reader to “see” the setting. The writer typically is concerned with habits, customs, religious practices, dress, fashion, favorite foods, language, dialect, common expressions, peculiarities, and surrounding flora and fauna of a particular locale. Local Color pieces were sometimes told from the perspective of an outsider (such as travelers or journalists) looking into a particular rural, isolated locale that had been generally closed off from the contemporary world. In some stories, the local inhabitants would examine their own environments, nostalgically trying to preserve in writing the “ways things were” in the “good old days.” The Local Color story often involved a worldly “stranger” coming into a rather closed off locale populated with common folk. From there the story took a variety of turns, but often the stranger, who believed he was superior to the country bumpkins, was fooled or tricked in some way. Nostalgia and sentimentality, and even elements of the Romantic style of the earlier part of the century, may infuse a Local Color story. Often, the story is humorous, with a local trickster figure outwitting the more urbane outsider or interloper. In Local Color stories about the Old South, for example, nostalgia for a bygone era may be prevalent. The “plantation myth” popularized by Thomas Nelson Page, for instance, might offer a highly filtered and altered view of plantation life as idyllic, for both master and slave. Local Color stories about the West, such as Mark Twain’s “The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” might offer raucous stories with stock characters of gamblers or miners who outwit the interloper from the city, who flaunts his intellectual superiority over the locals. An early African-American writer, Charles Chesnutt, used the Local Color style of writing to deconstruct the plantation myth by showing the innate dignity, intelligence, and power of slaves or former slaves who outwit the white racist landowners.

Local Color writing can be seen as a transitional type of writing that took American literature away from the Romantic style and more firmly into the Realistic style. The characters are more realistically drawn, with very human, sometimes ignoble, traits: they swear, speak in regional dialect, swat flies away from their faces, and make mistakes; they are both comic and pitiable. The setting is realistically drawn as well: a real-life location, with accurate depictions of setting, people, and local customs. Local Color writing, however, does not reach the more stylistically and thematically complicated dimensions of Realistic writing. Local Color works tend to be somewhat sentimental stories with happy endings or at least endings where good prevails over evil. Characters are often flat or two-dimensional who are either good or bad. Outlandish and improbable events often happen during the course of the story, and characters sometimes undergo dramatic and unbelievable changes in characterization. Local Color did, however, begin a trend in American literature that allowed for a more authentic American style and storyline about characters who speak like Americans, not the British aristocracy, real-life American places, and more down-to-earth, recognizably human characters.

Regionalism (1875-1895)

Regionalism can be seen as a more sophisticated form of Local Color, with the author using one main character (the protagonist) to offer a specific point of view in the story. Regionalist writers often employ Local Color elements in their fiction. After all, they are concerned with the characteristics of a particular locale or region. However, regionalist writers tell the story empathetically, from the protagonist’s perspective. That is, the Regional writer attempts to render a convincing surface of a particular time and place, but investigates the psychological character traits from a more universal perspective. Characters tend to be more three-dimensional and the plot less formulaic or predictable. Often what prevents Regional writers from squarely falling into the category of “Realist” is their tendency toward nostalgia, sentimentality, authorial intrusion, or a rather contrived or happy ending.

In Sarah Orne Jewett’s “A White Heron,” for example, the story has a number of features of Local Color stories: characters speak in a New England dialect, the landscape is described in detail, the customs and rituals of farming class families are described, and an outsider—the young male ornithologist—comes to this secluded region with a sense of superiority and is thwarted in his endeavors by young Sylvy who refuses to give up the secret location of the heron. However, the story is told from the perspective of Sylvy, and readers gain insight into her inner conflict as she attempts to make a difficult decision. We gain awareness of Sylvy’s complexity as a character, a young girl who is faced with making an adult decision, a choice that will force her to grow up and face the world from a more mature stance. Jewett does, at times, allow the narrator to intrude in order to encourage readers to feel sympathy for Sylvy. Therefore, the story does not exhibit the narrative objectivity of a Realistic story.

Regionalism has often been used as a term to describe many works by women writers during the late nineteenth century; however, it is a term which, unfortunately, has confined these women writers’ contribution to American literature to a particular style. Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman, for example, certainly wrote about the New England region, but their larger focus was on ordinary women in domestic spaces who seek self-agency in a male-dominated culture. Kate Chopin set most of her works among the Creole and Acadian social classes of the Louisiana Bayou region, yet the larger themes of her works offer examinations of women who long for passionate and personal fulfillment and for the ability to live authentic, self-directed lives. Like the established theorists of Realism—Howells, Twain, and James—women writers of the time, including Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Ellen Glasgow, who are generally not thought of as Regional writers, produced work which often defied strict labeling and which contributed to the beginning of a feminist tradition in American literature. While literary labels help frame the style and method of stories written in the late nineteenth century, most literary works—especially those that have withstood the test of time—defy reductionism.

In America, industrialization can be seen as the process by which advances in technology in the nineteenth century led to the shift from farm production to manufacturing production.

In America, the rise of industry in the mid to late nineteenth century and beyond caused a shift in America from a primarily agrarian economy to an industrial economy.

America saw a steep rise in immigration in the nineteenth century, as people from other countries moved to America for a variety of personal and political reasons but primarily to find work in America’s growing industries, including the building of the transcontinental railroad.

Local color is a type of writing that became popular after the American Civil War. It is a sub-movement of writing that generally preceded and influenced the rise of Realism in American writing while it still retained some features of the Romanticism, the movement which preceded it. Local color writing focuses on the distinctive features of particular locale, including the customs, language, mannerisms, habits, and peculiarities of people and place, thereby predicting some aspects of the Realists’ writing style, which focused on accuracy and detail. However, in Local Color stories, the characters are often predictable character types rather than the complex characters offered by Realist writers. Additionally, Local Color stories often retain Romantic features of emotion (including sentimentality and nostalgia) and idealism (with endings that are neatly resolved). Examples include Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi.

Regionalism is a type of writing that was practiced after the American Civil War. It is a sub-movement of writing that generally preceded and influenced the rise of Realism in American writing. Regionalism, like Local Color, employs a focus on the details associated with a particular place, but Regionalist stories often feature a more complex narrative structure, including the creation of a main protagonist who provides the perspective or point of view through which the plot of the story is told. Such a shift in the technique of narration aligns Regionalist writers more closely with Realist writers, who are known for their complex characters who exhibit psychological dimensionality. However, Regionalist stories, like Local Color stories, often retain Romantic features of emotion (including sentimentality and nostalgia) and idealism (with endings that are neatly resolved).

In Kate Chopin’s work, the French Creoles are of Spanish or French descent. They are typically white and are considered members of the upper class.

In Kate Chopin’s work, the Acadians (or ‘Cadians) were of French or French- Canadian descent. They may be depicted as having a mixed racial and ethnic heritage, and they do not have the wealth and status that the Creoles have.

The advocacy of equality between the sexes. In the United States, feminism can be defined as a series of social, cultural, economic, and political movements that emphasized and called for equality for women.

American Literatures After 1865 Copyright © by Amy Berke; Jordan Cofer; and Doug Davis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Realism in american literature, 1860-1890.

Other Views of Realism

"The basic axiom of the realistic view of morality was that there could be no moralizing in the novel [ . . . ] The morality of the realists, then, was built upon what appears a paradox--morality with an abhorrence of moralizing. Their ethical beliefs called, first of all, for a rejection of scheme of moral behavior imposed, from without, upon the characters of fiction and their actions. Yet Howells always claimed for his works a deep moral purpose. What was it? It was based upon three propositions: that life, social life as lived in the world Howells knew, was valuable, and was permeated with morality; that its continued health depended upon the use of human reason to overcome the anarchic selfishness of human passions; that an objective portrayal of human life, by art, will illustrate the superior value of social, civilized man, of human reason over animal passion and primitive ignorance" (157). Everett Carter, Howells and the Age of Realism (Philadelphia and New York: Lippincott, 1954).

"Realism sets itself at work to consider characters and events which are apparently the most ordinary and uninteresting, in order to extract from these their full value and true meaning. It would apprehend in all particulars the connection between the familiar and the extraordinary, and the seen and unseen of human nature. Beneath the deceptive cloak of outwardly uneventful days, it detects and endeavors to trace the outlines of the spirits that are hidden there; tho measure the changes in their growth, to watch the symptoms of moral decay or regeneration, to fathom their histories of passionate or intellectual problems. In short, realism reveals. Where we thought nothing worth of notice, it shows everything to be rife with significance." -- George Parsons Lathrop, 'The Novel and its Future," Atlantic Monthly 34 (September 1874):313 24.

“Realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.” --William Dean Howells, “Editor’s Study,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine (November 1889) , p. 966.

"Realism, n. The art of depicting nature as it is seen by toads. The charm suffusing a landscape painted by a mole, or a story written by a measuring-worm." --Ambrose Bierce The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

Context and Controversy

In its own time, realism was the subject of controversy; debates over the suitability of realism as a mode of representation led to a critical exchange known as the realism war. (Click here for a brief overview.)

The realism of James and Twain was critically acclaimed in the twentieth century. Howellsian realism fell into disfavor, however, as part of early twentieth century rebellion against the "genteel tradition." For an account of these and other issues, see the realism bibliography and essays by Pizer, Michael Anesko, Richard Lehan, and Louis J. Budd, among others, in the Cambridge Guide to Realism and Naturalism .

© 1997-2013. Donna M. Campbell. Some information adapted from Resisting Regionalism: Gender and Naturalism in American Fiction, 1885-1915 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1997) .

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › The Realism of Henry James

The Realism of Henry James

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on January 8, 2018 • ( 4 )

Though Henry James (1843–1916) was an American novelist, he saw the word “American” as embracing a certain cultural openness, or in his words, a “fusion and synthesis of the various National tendencies of the world.”1 The experience underlying James’ creative and critical work was international in scope. During his childhood he had spent some years in Europe; in later life he moved to London, often visiting Italy and France. Some of his best-known novels explore intercultural connections; these include The American (1877), The Europeans (1878), Daisy Miller (1879), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). He was influenced by the European as well as American Romantics, and was acquainted with the so-called realist and naturalist writers such as William Dean Howells , Gustave Flaubert, and Émile Zola. His literary-critical views were influenced by Goethe , Matthew Arnold , and Sainte- Beuve . From these writers he acquired the idea of critical “disinterestedness,” which he saw as effecting a mediation between history and philosophy (his brother was the pragmatist philosopher William James ), since criticism deals with both ideas and facts. James’ own influence spanned both sides of the Atlantic, extending to figures such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot.

It is in his essay The Art of Fiction  (1884) that James most succinctly expressed his critical principles as well as a justification of his novelistic endeavor. The motivation of his essay is threefold. Firstly, he is combating what he takes to be a general reluctance to view the novel as a genuine art form. His text was written in part as a direct response to a lecture and pamphlet of the same title by the novelist and critic Walter Besant . James is concerned to establish the novel as a serious art form rather than as merely an amusing or escapist pastime. Secondly, while he applauds Besant ’s attempt to foster this serious treatment of fiction, he disputes Besant ’s assumptions that rules can be somehow prescribed for fiction. James’ central claim is that the novelist and the novel must be free. Finally, James is highly conscious of a puritanical environment which views art as having an injurious effect, and as opposed to morality, amusement, or instruction. Hence, for James, novelistic freedom entails also a liberation from moral and educational requirements and constraints.

While James’ central thesis is that the novel must be free, its freedom is first worked out in relation to the kind of novelistic realism on which James insists: “The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life . . . as the picture is reality, so the novel is history” (166–167). In attempting to represent life, the novelist’s task is analogous with that of the painter; and in searching for truth, the novelistic art is analogous with philosophy as well as history. This “double analogy,” says James, “is a magnificent heritage” (167).

James suggests as a broad definition of the genre that the novel is “a personal, a direct impression of life,” and it is successful inasmuch as it reveals a particular and unique mind (170). Hence, the procedure of artistic realism cannot be prescribed. He is effectively disputing Besant ’s claim that the “laws of fiction may be laid down and taught with . . . precision and exactness” (170). Moreover, the enterprise of realism is vastly complex. The writer should indeed possess “a sense of reality” but “reality has a myriad forms” and cannot be encompassed within some formula (171). The realism advocated by James seems to consist not, then, in passive imitation but in producing “the illusion of life” (173).

It is equally inconclusive and inexact, says James, to ask the novelist to write from experience. Like reality, experience is a complex concept. Experience “is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spiderweb of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness . . . It is the very atmosphere of the mind” (172). A mere glimpse of a situation can afford a perspicacious novelist an entire perspective based on deep insight. Interestingly, James’ definition of “experience” reads like a reformulation of the definition of “imagination” by Romantics such as Coleridge. James states that the “power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it – this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience” (172). Whereas, for Coleridge , imagination was a power rooted in symbolism, a power to unite general and particular, James’ notion of experience as a “gift” is rooted in metonymy, a power essentially of judging the whole from the part. No longer is there some vast symbolic correspondence implied between word and reality; but the world is still considered to be ordered enough to be read in a coherent manner, for the entirety to be able to manifest itself in any particular partial expression. Modernist writers will be deprived of even this metonymic satisfaction. Indeed, James identifies the very freedom of the novel with its potential for realistic – which for him might well read “metonymic” – correspondence: the novel has a “large, free character of an immense and exquisite correspondence with life” (179). Notwithstanding the complex nature of both reality and experience, James, reminding us of his earlier affirmation, states that “the air of reality (solidity of specification) seems to me to be the supreme virtue of a novel – the merit on which all its other merits (including that conscious moral purpose of which Mr. Besant speaks) helplessly and submissively depends. If it be not there they are all as nothing” (173). The choice of words here is telling: all other factors, including any moral purpose, are erected on the enabling foundation of realism.

Owing to the deeply personal nature of experience, as well as its potential breadth and complexity, a novelist cannot be taught how to express reality. An important part of the freedom James seeks for the novelist consists in the liberty to experiment. Form is not achieved in any a priori fashion; it is something that undergoes continual modification through experience of reality (169, 171). The novel must also be free in its choice of theme and subject matter: the province of art, says James, is all life, not only those elements which are beautiful or noble (178). In all art, says James, one becomes “conscious of an immense increase – a kind of revelation – of freedom . . . the province of art is all life, all feeling, all observation, all vision . . . it is all experience.” As such, nothing can be forbidden for the novelist, nothing can be out of bounds (177–178). James suggests that the foremost capacity of the novelist must be that of “receiving straight impressions” (178). Fiction must catch “the strange irregular rhythm of life . . . without rearrangement” so that “we feel that we are touching the truth” (177). The implication here seems to be that the novelist accurately records “straight” impressions, without somehow distorting them; yet James also concedes that “Art is essentially selection, but it is a selection whose main care is to be typical, to be inclusive” (177). There seems to be a discrepancy between saying, on the one hand, that the novel records life without distortion, and, on the other hand, acknowledging that this record is inevitably subjective, penned from merely one of “innumerable points of view,” from a perspective which is in fact unique. James’ position might be seen as expressing a precarious balance in the historical transition between classical and modern realism. A vestige of Aristotelian realism persists in James’ view that it is still possible to speak of the “typically” human; and a foreshadowing of modernistic subjectivism is pronounced in his equal acceptance that the novelistic vision must be individual and unique. The two factors appear to be unreconciled in James’ text.

Finally, James argues against Besant’s claim that the novel must have a “conscious moral purpose”; the novel, says James, should be free of moral and other obligations. His reasoning is apparently simple: “questions of art are questions . . . of execution; questions of morality are quite another affair.” If art has a purpose, that purpose is artistic: it must aim at perfection (181). James acknowledges that the moral sense and the artistic sense are in one point very closely allied, namely in their conviction that “the deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer. In proportion as that intelligence is fine will the novel, the picture, the statue partake of the substance of beauty and truth. To be constituted of such elements is, to my vision, to have purpose enough” (181). Again, for all of his insistence on realism, the emphasis is here once more deflected toward subjectivity, to the mind and ability of the novelist: it is this subjectivity that the novel most profoundly expresses. Ironically, just at this point where James’ conception of the novel points toward modernism, in terms of both its subjective grounding and its subordination of morality to aesthetic purpose, he has recourse to the ancient Aristotelian category of substance, and to the Platonic identification of beauty and truth, together with the Platonic notion of “partaking” as the means whereby earthly beauty is realized through invocation of a transcendent realm.

Notes 1. Letter to T. S. Perry, September 20, 1867, quoted in the introduction to Henry James, The Art of Criticism, ed. William Veeder and Susan M. Griffin (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 1. Hereafter page citations from this volume are given in the text.

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Hi Kirstin,

Thank you. Good for LU1. I’ll share when I’m back on the BA whatsapp group.

On 22 Jan 2018 17:20, “Literary Theory and Criticism Notes” wrote:

> Nasrullah Mambrol posted: “Though Henry James (1843–1916) was an American > novelist, he saw the word “American” as embracing a certain cultural > openness, or in his words, a “fusion and synthesis of the various National > tendencies of the world.”1 The experience underlying James’ crea” >

Thank you. This is an excellent and highly useful analysis. Very insightful. Great use of examples and well-referenced. Bravo.

• Analysis of William Dean Howells’s Novels – Literary Theory and Criticism Notes
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For over fifty years, American Literary Realism has brought readers critical essays on American literature from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The whole panorama of great authors from this key transition period in American literary history, including Henry James, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, and many others, is discussed in articles, book reviews, critical essays, bibliographies, documents, and notes on all related topics. Each issue is also a valuable bibliographic resource. Recent issues have included essays on Jack London and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

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American Realism: Literature Reflecting a Nation in Transition Essay

Introduction, historical context, values and faith, genres and styles, authors and proceedings.

Realism is a trend in literature and art that aims at truthful and objective reproduction of reality in its typical features. The reign of realism followed the era of Romanticism and preceded symbolism. This literary trend originated in the XIX century, and its adherents sharply opposed sophisticated forms of poetry and the use of various mystical concepts in works. The concept of realism is a term, and nothing more, and in order to understand the essence of the direction, it is necessary not only to know its definition, but also its defining features, principles, philosophy and other foundations.

The second half of the 19th century was marked by the American Civil War. This war became the bloodiest conflict in the history of the nation. Of all the world powers, America was the only one in the XIX century to go through such a terrible historical shock (Thomas, 2021). When the war ended, and slavery ended, the pace of social development increased enormously. Big cities were growing by leaps and bounds; with them, slums inhabited by yesterday’s slaves and immigrants who knew no more than a dozen phrases in English. Literature responded to these dramatic, exciting events sometimes with enthusiasm and more often with alertness. Many writers, filled with great hopes and faith in the historic mission of America, then experienced periods of doubt and disappointment.

One of the main problems of American philosophy was the gradual elimination of religion from public life. Now thinkers were faced with the critical question of knowing themselves and the world around them. The ideas of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had a great influence on the literary world (Thomas, 2021). Nietzsche was an atheist and believed that the norms and values that the Christian church preaches are false, because they elevate weakness and insignificance into virtue, and strength into sin, so people have become weak.

The new school of American philosophers and psychologists sought to ensure that seemingly abstract arguments about materialism, idealism, determinism, and free will were established in the minds of Americans as something directly concerning them. In this way, they tried to prevent the washing away of the true human foundations of life by a massive flow of mechanical forces. In the works of the greatest realists, the American novel asserted its special theme of human resistance to the disfiguring influence of the environment (Thomas, 2021). In this sense, the choice of the main characters is extremely indicative. The essence of a realistic image of a person is the destruction of a ready-made scheme, including a moralistic one, with its simple opposition: bad — good.

To the question, “What is God?” American realists no longer answered in the context of religion. Nietzsche’s famous thesis – God is dead – became the personification of the perception of God in the 20th century (Thomas, 2021). Religion, according to Nietzsche, turned people into enslaved people. An enslaved person cannot find the foundation of his life in himself. As soon as scientific discoveries shook religion’s authority, humanity’s slavish nature was immediately revealed. That is why realists depict a person’s inner impulses and desires, thanks to which he can achieve his goal. The religious answer to the question “What does it mean to be a good person?”, is that a person must observe the postulates and not commit bad deeds regulated by religion. Now the essence of a realistic image of a person is the destruction of a ready-made scheme, including a moralistic one, with its simple opposition: bad — good. People survive only because of their inner strength, which stems from kindness, flexibility, and individuality.

The greatest writer of the early XX century Jack London reveals the theme of social inequality in his stories. They describe a new and unfamiliar world for Americans — fearless people, gold diggers of the North, the world of romance and adventure (Newlin, 2019). The reverse side of the economic prosperity of the United States is depicted on a grand scale in the novels of the outstanding American writer Theodore Dreiser. One of the best works of the writer is the novel American Tragedy . The novel reflects the American way of life, in which the poverty of workers from the outskirts stands out vividly against the affluence of the privileged class (Newlin, 2019). He portrayed the social order surrounding him with the unwavering strength and skill of a true realist. However, despite how harsh the world appeared before his eyes, the writer never lost faith in the dignity and greatness of man and his beloved country.

At the end of the XIX century, a short story occupies a prominent place in American literature. O’Henry proved himself to be a virtuoso master of the short story, a light, and cheerful novella. He longed for “simple, honest prose” and sought to free himself from certain stereotypes and “pink endings” that the press expects (Newlin, 2019). The next favorite genre among American realists is writing. This genre evokes a special feeling of the author’s deep interest in what is being described, the feeling that what is being discussed is not indifferent but exciting, vital for the creator of the work. The Russian culturologist M. Bakhtin studied speech as a realistic literature genre. Bakhtin’s examples range from informal conversations to practical issues, such as chronicles, contracts, and letters, to literary ones, with a special emphasis on the novel. The realism genre was valid only in prose, and they had lost their realism in poetry.

Mark Twain is one of the first realists in American history. His most realistic and significant work is the novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer . This work is about childhood, its special world, special laws, and an exceptional understanding of life when the main thing is the desire for freedom from the rules and conventions imposed by the “adult world” (Twain, 2022). Among other things, the book about the adventures of Tom Sawyer was a parody of a very popular genre of literature about good and bad children in the USA at that time (Twain, 2022). This genre performed a purely moralizing function and unequivocally proved that virtue should be rewarded. The images of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, despite the significant are similar in the main thing: they do not fit into the framework of the image of a “good boy” in any way (Twain, 2022). However, the most important thing for the writer was that Tom, in the process of both fictional and quite real trials and adventures, acquires the ability to judge everything, if not soberly, then with compassion.

The next writer, Stephen Crane, had roots dating back to the era of the American Revolutionary War. Having published a novel about the Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage, he enjoys constant success as a champion of the common person, a realist, and a symbolist. Maggie Crane: The Girl of the Streets is one of the best, if not the earliest, realistic American novels. This is the heartbreaking story of a poor, sensitive young girl whose parents completely let her down. She wants to escape her abusive family life, so she starts living with a young man who soon leaves her (Sigar et al., 2020). When her mother rejects her, Maggie becomes a prostitute to survive, but she soon commits suicide out of desperation. Crane’s earthly subject matter and objective, scientific style, devoid of moralizing, distinguish Maggie Crane: The Girl of the Streets as a real job.

Another American writer, William Dean Howells, used the genre of realism as a patronage and illumination of the identity of the American way of life. Howells asserts the dominance of ethical values as opposed to the ideology of bourgeois success. In later works, the author tried to show that the USA is following its path of realism (Newlin, 2019). Democratic rights and freedoms are triumphant in the USA, so optimism and joy are much more appropriate. The main thing in the book is the contrast between the idle upper class and the suffering lower classes, as well as various attempts to eliminate or mitigate social injustice. The writer builds a whole system of characters — social types and carriers of different points of view, without giving final and simple answers to complex questions.

Analyzing Mark Twain’s famous work The Adventures of Tom Sawyer , one can characterize the author as a representative of American realism. Twain not only entertains the reader. There are not so many puns, comic hoaxes, or parodies in the story as in some of his early works. Even now, laughter helps the writer show different sides of American life. Twain mockingly draws churchmen and exposes the falsity of Sunday school. In St. Petersburg, he shows, there are a lot of hypocrites (Twain, 2022). The widow Douglas “prays all the time — may she be empty!” and causes Huck irritation. There is no real purity in the church, the choristers are always giggling, and no one can listen to a boring sermon (Twain, 2022). Boys exchange tickets received for memorizing verses from the Bible for fish hooks. As a result, Tom, who cannot name any of the twelve apostles, but managed to exchange the right number of tickets, is awarded the Bible for his superior knowledge of the gospel.

To conclude, America’s suddenly changed habitual life has affected all spheres of culture. American writers were now surrounded, on the one hand, by the collapse of existing religious and state foundations, coupled with the devastating civil war that had left its mark, and on the other hand, by an abundance of new scientific, technical, biological and philosophical concepts that viewed the role of man and nature in the world in a new way. The emergence of realism logically stems from the cultural upheaval of people’s consciousness. American realists sought to convey concrete authenticity in the description of the existing reality, attention to the surrounding world in all its manifestations, recognition of everyday, everyday human life worthy of artistic description, and conviction in the ability of art to know and reflect the real world.

Newlin, K. (2019). The Oxford handbook of American literary realism . Oxford Handbooks.

Sigar, P. Y., Rorintulus, O., & Lolowang, I. S. (2020). The influence of the environment to Maggie’s behavior in Crane’s “Maggie: a girl of the street”. Journal of English Culture, Language, Literature and Education , 8 (1), 64-79.

Thomas, B. (2021). American literary realism and the failed promise of contract . University of California Press.

Twain, M. (2022). Complete works of Mark Twain. Illustrated: The adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The adventures of Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, personal recollections of Joan of Arc, The Prince and the Pauper and others . Strelbytskyy Multimedia Publishing.

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IvyPanda. (2024, February 6). American Realism: Literature Reflecting a Nation in Transition. https://ivypanda.com/essays/american-realism-literature-reflecting-a-nation-in-transition/

"American Realism: Literature Reflecting a Nation in Transition." IvyPanda , 6 Feb. 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/american-realism-literature-reflecting-a-nation-in-transition/.

IvyPanda . (2024) 'American Realism: Literature Reflecting a Nation in Transition'. 6 February.

IvyPanda . 2024. "American Realism: Literature Reflecting a Nation in Transition." February 6, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/american-realism-literature-reflecting-a-nation-in-transition/.

1. IvyPanda . "American Realism: Literature Reflecting a Nation in Transition." February 6, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/american-realism-literature-reflecting-a-nation-in-transition/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "American Realism: Literature Reflecting a Nation in Transition." February 6, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/american-realism-literature-reflecting-a-nation-in-transition/.

• Growing Up in "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" by Twain
• Religion and Superstition in Twain's "Tom Sawyer"
• Inner Conflicts in Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"
• “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” by Mark Twain
• Mark Twain and His Humor According to Critics
• Mark Twain’s Creative Writing Process
• Make-Believe Plays in "Tom Sawyer" vs "Little Women"
• Naturalism and Realism of Mark Twain and Jack London
• Tom Sawyers through perspective of Don Quixote
• Crane Types Used in Construction
• Henry’s Change of Attitude in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms
• Nonconformity in the “A&P” Story by John Updike
• The "Housekeeping" Novel by Marilynne Robinson
• James Baldwin's Place in American Society
• The "I'm a Fool" Short Story by Sherwood Anderson

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Naturalizing Jurisprudence: Essays on American Legal Realism and Naturalism in Legal Philosophy

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The author is widely recognized as the leading philosophical interpreter of the jurisprudence of American Legal Realism, as well as the most influential proponent of the relevance of the naturalistic turn in philosophy to the problems of legal philosophy. This volume collects newly revised versions of ten of his best-known essays, which set out his reinterpretation of the Legal Realists as prescient philosophical naturalists; critically engage with jurisprudential responses to Legal Realism, from legal positivism to Critical Legal Studies; connect the Realist program to the methodology debate in contemporary jurisprudence; and explore the general implications of a naturalistic world view for problems about the objectivity of law and morality. He has supplied a lengthy new introductory essay, as well as postscripts to several of the essays, in which he responds to challenges to his interpretive and philosophical claims by academic lawyers and philosophers.

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Naturalizing Jurisprudence: Essays on American Legal Realism and Naturalism in Legal Philosophy

Brian Leiter, Naturalizing Jurisprudence: Essays on American Legal Realism and Naturalism in Legal Philosophy , Oxford UP, 2007, 287pp., $50.00 (pbk), ISBN 9780199206490.

Reviewed by Robin Bradley Kar, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Brian Leiter is one of the leading proponents of the use and application of so-called "naturalistic developments" in contemporary philosophy to central questions in analytic jurisprudence. He is also arguably the leading philosophical interpreter of legal realism. In Naturalizing Jurisprudence , he collects many of his most important essays on these topics, organized by theme, and presents previously unpublished responses to critics. The result is a work that goes well beyond the individual essays to present a trenchant, multi-faceted and mutually-reinforcing set of challenges to core views and methodologies that are prevalent in the field. In an important sense, the book is also agenda-setting: it clarifies the impact that naturalistic developments in philosophy can have on core questions in analytic jurisprudence, while gesturing towards a larger and partly empirical project aimed at working out the full scope of these consequences for legal epistemology, the nature of law, and the objectivity of legal judgment.

This is thus an important book by one of the most influential legal philosophers of our time. In what follows, I will critically examine the three parts of this book, which address, more specifically: (1) the philosophical legacy of American legal realism, with specific reference to the nature of justification in adjudication; (2) the appropriate philosophical methodology to determine the nature of law (including what conclusions to draw from this methodology); and (3) the bearing that issues in meta-ethics might have on legal objectivity. Although Leiter devotes portions of his book to arguing for various of his naturalistic commitments as well, these are large topics, which have commanded an enormous literature of their own. The commitments themselves are controversial but have a distinguished pedigree and have garnered widespread approval in one form or another. It is therefore clearly important to know what naturalism might mean for jurisprudence if true. Leiter's more distinctive contributions are, in any event, on this narrower topic, and I will therefore focus on those aspects of his work here.

One initial issue concerns the meaning of the word "naturalism". Although this term does not have a single definition in philosophy, most people associate the term with several core commitments, which can be stated in broad brush fashion. The first is a metaphysical view, which states that properties, or events, must be capable of explaining some aspect of our experience, or making the right kind of causal difference in our experience, if they are to be considered real. Naturalists often differ, at this stage, over the precise types of explanations that will count. The second is an epistemological view, which holds that the modern sciences have proven to be our best method of ascertaining what is true about the world, and which thus holds scientific inquiry up as the paradigm of knowledge formation. The term can also refer more specifically to a special way of answering epistemological questions, which owes itself to Quine's famous work on naturalized epistemology. There is also a more minimalist and yet still fully naturalistic constraint that one might place on epistemology, which is simply to rule out any claims to knowledge about a particular subject matter that either presuppose the existence of any non-natural properties, in the metaphysical sense noted above, or would require us to have scientifically implausible psychological capacities to obtain the relevant knowledge.

Finally, most so-called "naturalist" philosophers either reject, or are at least highly skeptical of, the possibility of acquiring a priori knowledge through conceptual analysis. On a methodological level, many naturalists favor a view of philosophy as the most general and reflective branch of the sciences instead. Leiter uses the term "naturalism" to refer to each of these ideas at different places in his book, and he gives them further refinements as appropriate. In what follows, I will therefore indicate what sense or senses are most pertinent to the discussion at hand.

In Part I of Naturalizing Jurisprudence , Leiter draws on Quine's work on naturalized epistemology to present a philosophical reconstruction of American Legal Realism. The term "American Legal Realism" (hereafter legal realism) refers to an important set of developments in U.S. legal academia, which date back to the 1920s and 30s, and are typically associated with two primary views: first , that the law is indeterminate, and, second , that "the law just is what judges decide it is". Within the legal academy, most non-philosophers take legal realism to express an undeniable part of the truth (as reflected in the familiar motto that "we are all legal realists now"), whereas most philosophers consider Hart's work in The Concept of Law to have exposed legal realism's central tenets to be philosophical non-starters. This state of affairs is unfortunate, in my view, because it prevents both sides from appreciating important insights into the law that are reflected, perhaps only imperfectly, in their opponents' claims. One of the most important, though as yet underappreciated, aspects of Leiter's work may thus lie in its ability to help ease the reception of legal philosophy within the larger legal academy by producing a deeper reconciliation between these common views. Leiter is, of course, more than clear that he has the converse aim: to bring legal realist insights back into central debates in analytic jurisprudence.

Consider three ways that one might try to understand the basic legal realist claims under discussion. First, one might interpret them as expressing a deeply skeptical philosophical claim, to the effect that we cannot make sense of objective tests for legal validity. As Leiter notes, this view, which is now more commonly associated with the critical legal studies movement, was the genuine target of Hart's criticisms, and these criticisms were largely successful. Leiter is thus careful to distinguish his own philosophical reconstruction from these skeptical views. Second, one might interpret the legal realists as making no philosophical claims at all, and as instead making only a series of empirical claims about what explains actual judicial decisions. On this view, the legal realists would be claiming that legal reasons (even as applied to the relevant facts) do not explain actual judicial decisions (in at least an important class of cases), whereas other factors do. Empirical claims of this kind are perfectly consistent with Hart's work because they say nothing about the possibility of objective tests for legal validity. Still, to reconcile legal realism with Hart's work in this way would produce a decidedly minimal reconciliation, because it would caste the legal realists' insights as wholly irrelevant to the philosophy of law. (In what follows, I will thus call this a "merely empirical" project.) Third, and finally, one might try to identify something non-skeptical but of philosophical significance in the legal realists' insights, something that might speak to a specifically philosophical problem, such as the nature of justification in adjudication. This would be a more ambitious project, and one with the potential for a much more robust and consequential reconciliation. Leiter's project falls squarely into this third category, and his work is unique in this regard.

Leiter begins this project by specifying in more detail the discrete set of legal realist claims that will serve as the basis for his philosophical reconstruction. Leiter reads the legal realists as making, first, a specific (and somewhat narrow) underdetermination claim: namely, that -- in those hard cases that typically reach the stages of appellate litigation -- the class of legal reasons (as applied to the relevant facts) underdetermine judicial decisions. Second, Leiter reads the legal realists as jointly committed to a "Core View", according to which judges respond primarily to the stimulus of the facts (rather than the law) in these cases. Although many associate legal realism with the further view that judges have unfettered discretion in these cases, and are motivated primarily by personal idiosyncracies, Leiter reminds us that there was another, distinct strain of legal realism, according to which judges instead give predictable responses to recurring and identifiable fact-scenarios. These particular legal realists therefore recommended an empirical research program aimed at uncovering the general principles that explain judicial behavior in this class of cases. Notice that a research program of this kind would be naturalistic , in the sense that it would be methodologically continuous with the sciences and would replace a priori inquiries (here, into the nature of justification in adjudication) with a purely psychological set of questions. The program would also be pragmatic , in the sense that it would aim to uncover empirical generalizations that lawyers might use to predict how judges will actually decide cases. One of Leiter's explicit aims in Part I is, in fact, to bring naturalistic and pragmatic developments in contemporary philosophy more squarely into jurisprudential debates, and his initial means of doing this is by this interpretation of legal realism.

There is a real question whether this particular constellation of views accurately describes any one or more of the historical legal realists' claims, but this question is, in my view, ultimately the wrong one to ask in the present context. The constellation is either close enough to many of the historical legal realists' views, or can be derived from sufficiently articulated strains of legal realism, to merit attention as a recognizable form of legal realism. Leiter is, moreover, seeking to glean insights from the legal realists' work that might have genuine philosophical significance, and, for these purposes, his reconstruction will almost certainly have to be more philosophically sophisticated than anything the historical realists might have articulated on their own. Leiter argues that this constellation of views also meets the minimal requirement of being reconcilable with Hart's criticisms because -- unlike the deeply skeptical views of legal validity that Hart meant to target with his criticisms in The Concept of Law -- this version presupposes an objective test for legal validity when distinguishing between legal and non-legal reasons in its initial underdetermination claim. This version of legal realism also asserts only local rather than global, or philosophical, indeterminacy. The more important question is thus whether this project can be distinguished from a merely empirical one in a way that might establish its philosophical significance.

Leiter's basic strategy for establishing this significance is the following. He asks us to consider, by analogy, what Quine sought to do by "naturalizing" questions of epistemology. Because this analogy is so critical to Leiter's work, I want to spell out the main steps of Quine's argument, as I understand them, for later reference. Quine was interested in the nature of justification in the production of scientific knowledge, and, when examining this problem, he famously argued that:

(1) Our scientific theories are, logically speaking, underdetermined by the empirical evidence, in part because, for any recalcitrant piece of data, we can choose either to abandon the theoretical hypothesis that we are testing or preserve it while abandoning some of the auxiliary hypotheses that informed the original test. (Here, Quine was following the earlier work of Pierre Duhem, though he was also extending it to the meanings that go into scientific theories.)

(2) We cannot, moreover, know any propositions to be true a priori (or prior to any experience) and analytically (or solely by virtue of the meanings of their terms), because there is no purely analytic domain of conceptual knowledge.

(3) Because of (2), we cannot rely purely on a priori , conceptual reasoning to determine what the right epistemic norms are to guide our processes of belief-revision when determining how to adjust our theories in response to recalcitrant empirical data.

(4) We must therefore acknowledge the bankruptcy of traditional philosophical inquiries (which purport to rely on pure conceptual analysis) into the nature of justification in the production of scientific knowledge.

(5) Yet importantly , the natural sciences have proven incredibly successful in producing knowledge (or true justified beliefs) about the world, and we have discovered no better means of producing such knowledge.

(6) Hence, we should replace traditional philosophical inquiries into the nature of justification in epistemology with a purely descriptive and psychological program that aims to discover the epistemic norms that actually govern our processes of belief-revision in the modern sciences.

Like Leiter's version of legal realism, Quine's program for epistemology is thus naturalistic , in the sense that it is methodologically continuous with the sciences and seeks to replace a priori inquiries (here, into the nature of justification in the production of scientific knowledge) with a purely psychological set of questions. Quine's recommended program is also pragmatic , in the sense that it seeks to identify those epistemic norms that actually work to produce knowledge in our most successful scientific practices. To understand the philosophical significance of the particular constellation of views that Leiter draws from the legal realists, Leiter thus asks us to view the American Legal Realists as "prescient philosophical naturalists" who recommended a similar naturalistic research program aimed at discovering how justification works in adjudication. This project should replace the misguided effort to produce a philosophical account of adjudication based solely on a priori reasoning with concepts.

In my view, Leiter's work has set the stage for an extraordinarily important and promising line of jurisprudential inquiry, though it is one that has not yet been taken up with sufficient zeal in the larger legal academy. What this program might reveal is a set of nonobvious factors and/or epistemic norms in virtue of which legal judgments are justified in practice, where by "nonobvious" I mean to refer to factors that go beyond both the content of the relevant legal sources, as interpreted using the relevant canons of interpretation, and the rules of logic combined. Factors like these would be analogous to the epistemic norms that govern theory construction in the sciences, but, while I expect there to be some overlap, there should also be important differences and distinctive contributions from convention (at least). Leiter has described this program quite nicely, but it has yet to be carried out with sufficient rigor to settle on an authoritative list of factors that might qualify for this role. This is a curious state of affairs, but my sense is that it persists because Leiter has not yet met the burden of distinguishing his project from a merely empirical one in a way that enough others have found sufficiently satisfying. Leiter does suggest, in this regard, that general worries about foundationalism in epistemology should apply to theories of adjudication (thereby suggesting the bankruptcy of foundationalist approaches to this topic as well), and he does observe that the naturalistic questions he would have us pursue as an alternative at least have the merit of being meaningful and useful. Apart from these points, however, Leiter depends almost exclusively on the analogy to Quine, and, in my view, this analogy needs to be further developed in three important ways if this project is to reach its full promise and widest possible audience.

First, one should remember that Quine himself refers to the successful practices of the modern sciences in what I have called step (5) of his argument. This success is critical to his larger argument that we should study these practices to identify epistemic norms that will have appropriate normative force. When turning to adjudication, however, it is less clear that our practices have been as successful, or even what the relevant criterion of success might be. Leiter might be read as touching on this issue when he distinguishes between what he calls the "sociological" and the "idiosyncrasy" wings of legal realism: the sociological wing studies consistent patterns of adjudications that cannot be derived from the mere application of legal sources to the relevant facts, but that one might nevertheless fairly characterize as producing "uniquely correct" decisions (at least on one plausible view), whereas the idiosyncrasy wing focuses on cases where psychological peculiarities about judges explain why they sometimes reach different outcomes in factually indistinguishable cases. Still, absent some further account of what success in adjudication amounts to, and how precisely to identify it, a naturalized project of this kind threatens to collapse into a merely empirical project.

Second, one must consider how best to frame an appropriate legal analogue of step (1) in Quine's argument. This step asserts the existence of indeterminacies in the evidence-theory relationship, where the logical relations between evidence about the world and various candidate scientific theories are relatively well understood. This understanding cannot be uncritically imported into the legal context, however, because there are important differences between knowledge about the world and knowledge about what the law requires in a given set of circumstances. Perhaps the most important such difference, for present purposes, arises from the role that conventions appear to play in producing legal knowledge. This role raises a number of special questions that a naturalized legal epistemology should address. For example: What is the precise role that conventions play in the production of legal knowledge? How should we account for these conventions in purely naturalistic terms, and in a way that would allow us to have epistemic access to their requirements? Is the role that conventions play in this special context ( i.e. , of producing legal knowledge) sufficient to substitute for the now discredited role that meanings were once thought to play in the production of a priori knowledge about the world? Or does the relationship between conventions and legal truth point in the opposite direction, by suggesting that legal truth -- unlike truth about the world -- may not even be complete? To say that truth about a given subject matter is "incomplete" is to say the following: it is not the case that for any proposition about that subject matter, either that proposition or its negation is true. Finally, are there any other important differences between legal knowledge and knowledge about the world that might affect the existence or scope of the relevant legal indeterminacies, or the shape of the relevant epistemic norms that constrain legal knowledge? Once again, answers to questions like these would help to clarify the appropriate contours of a naturalized approach to adjudication, and would provide useful guidance to researchers hoping to shed light on how legal knowledge is produced.

Third, one might clarify the jurisprudential stakes of this project by identifying concrete places where other theorists are relying on a priori conceptual analysis to drive parts of their own views on adjudication. Consider, for example, the phenomenon of hard cases. These are cases in which legal sources, as interpreted using the relevant canons of legal interpretation and as applied to the relevant facts of a case, fail to determine a uniquely correct resolution. Dworkin famously holds the view that cases like these nevertheless always admit of uniquely correct resolutions, which judges must identify by relying on substantive moral insight, whereas Hart famously held the view that these cases are always legally indeterminate and must be decided as an exercise of legal discretion. It seems plausible to me that one or both of these views might be derived from forms of conceptual reasoning that would be ruled out by the naturalistic commitments articulated at step (3) in Quine's argument, but one would need to say much more to establish that this is the case. Clarifying places in the literature where others theorists have relied on conceptual analysis in developing their alternative views on adjudication would therefore help not only to crystallize the jurisprudential stakes of the present project but also to highlight its distinctive contributions.

Part I of Leiter's book thus develops an important and distinctive approach to legal epistemology, which, in my view, invites a larger and more refined research program aimed at clarifying the nature of justification in adjudication.

In the second Part of the book, entitled "Ways of Naturalizing Jurisprudence", Leiter considers both the methodological and substantive impact that a naturalistic turn might have on the central question of analytic jurisprudence: namely, the "what is law" question. (This question is distinct from the "what does law require" question -- which was addressed more centrally in the last section.) On one widespread view, which is most commonly associated with Joseph Raz, the point of this inquiry is to acquire knowledge about what law is, where the philosophical search for knowledge is distinguished from the merely sociological search in the following way: sociologists of law aim to uncover empirical generalizations about law that may be only contingently true, whereas philosophers of law aim to identify propositions about law that are both necessarily true and adequately explain the nature of law. (The term "nature of law" refers here to those essential properties that a given set of phenomena must exhibit in order to be law.) Leiter accepts this basic characterization of the goal of analytic jurisprudence, and one can see why those attracted to this view, but who have not yet absorbed Quine's criticisms of analyticity, might think that conceptual analysis would be an appropriate method to generate this knowledge.

It is, in fact, striking just how much analytic jurisprudence engages in conceptual analysis and intuition pumping to determine what law is -- and how much proceeds without regard for how deeply these methods have been problematized as credible sources of knowledge. Leiter deserves rich praise for raising this issue, and for prompting a more reflective look into the appropriate role that conceptual analysis should play in this field. These are important questions of methodology, and a good portion of Part II is, in fact, dedicated to canvassing three distinct grounds for caution on this score. The first derives from Quine's famous criticisms of the analytic-synthetic distinction, which suggest that we may not even be able to make sense of a purely analytic domain of concepts that could give rise to a priori knowledge about the world. The second arises from a growing body of empirical work that has discovered parochialism in many of the linguistic intuitions that philosophers sometimes draw upon and assume to be universal. The third derives from the less than sterling history of conceptual analysis itself, which is replete with conceptual claims that were once thought to be necessarily true but that we have subsequently had to revise or abandon in light of further experience.

For those interested in developing a purely descriptive account of law, it would thus seem to follow that the traditional methods of conceptual analysis should be abandoned. Taking a cue from Quine, Leiter urges that analytic jurisprudence should instead become the most general and reflective branch of the sciences that study what law is. He then specifies this idea in the following way: we should answer the "what is law" question by asking which concept of law would make our best ongoing scientific inquiries into law true and explanatory. Application of this methodology then allows Leiter to make two major contributions to the "what is law" debate.

First, Leiter develops a response to an important set of recent challenges to legal positivism, and, in particular, to its stated goal of developing a purely descriptive and general account of law. These challenges arise from a group of natural law theorists (principally Stephen Perry, John Finnis, Ronald Dworkin, Gerald Postema, Nikos Stravopolous and Liam Murphy) who have each argued, in one way or another, that one cannot settle upon a satisfying account of the concept of law without engaging in substantive moral and/or normative argumentation. Although the details of these arguments vary, they share a common structure: they begin with the observation that more than one concept of law is logically consistent with the relevant empirical data about law (sometimes because there is more than one way to delimit the "relevant data"), and then argue that we must therefore engage in substantive moral and/or normative argumentation to settle on the right concept. As Leiter observes, however, this conceptual underdetermination parallels the more general undeterdetermination of theories by the evidence. If the aim is to produce a purely descriptive account of law, then -- Leiter urges -- there is no reason why the basic epistemic norms that constrain theory construction in the sciences cannot be applied to resolve this indeterminacy as well. Indeed, one might push the point further on Leiter's behalf, by noting that there is no pragmatic justification for the use of non-epistemic norms (such as moral norms) for the production of purely descriptive knowledge. Hence, reference to moral insight is not only unnecessary for this particular purpose but also unjustified and likely to conflict with that goal.

In my view, this aspect of Leiter's work is best understood as articulating a general method for answering worries about the brute possibility of settling on unique concepts of natural phenomena in the absence of moral and/or normative argumentation. Leiter's argument does not distinguish (nor does it purport to distinguish) between the moral value of different empirical inquiries, and so there should still be room to argue for the relative value of different empirical projects based on moral and/or normative grounds. Different forms of empirical inquiry might also yield somewhat different concepts of law, which pick out slightly different natural phenomena. None of this, however, should make it impossible to produce a purely descriptive account of those natural phenomena, and none of this should lead us to regard the truth values of these descriptions as turning on moral facts.

Second, Leiter enters into the more internecine debates between inclusive and exclusive legal positivists over whether the relevant tests for legality can incorporate moral criteria. Leiter argues, with some plausibility, that proponents on both sides of this debate have tended to rely on traditional forms of conceptual analysis and intuition pumping to support their respective views. Leiter observes that these arguments have nevertheless failed to settle the incorporability issue. Still, none of this should be surprising if -- as Leiter qua naturalistic philosopher has argued -- conceptual analysis alone is insufficient to produce knowledge about what anything is, let alone law. As noted above, Leiter has suggested that we can -- on the other hand -- provide a straightforward answer to this question if we ask instead which concept of law would render our best ongoing scientific inquiries into law true and explanatory. The relevant empirical research programs are said to be those generated by the legal realists, and these programs have produced the following claim: while legal sources (as interpreted using the relevant canons of legal interpretation) sometimes logically determine unique outcomes to legal disputes, these sources can also sometimes leave legal questions indeterminate. In order for this claim to be true and explanatory, we must presumably posit a concept of law that is completely source-based; only in terms of such a concept can we explain the special class of judicial behavior that is dubbed "determinate" in this claim, and thereby render the claim true. This concept is, moreover, none other than the exclusive legal positivist concept of law, which does not allow for the incorporation of moral criteria. If considerations like these are valid, they give rise to an important and distinctive set of considerations favoring exclusive legal positivism over both its inclusive legal positivist and non-positivist rivals.

From a naturalistic perspective, the central virtue to Leiter's method of answering the "what is law" question is that it guarantees that the resulting concept will pick out something real in the natural world. There are, however, at least two remaining questions that will arise for this view, even granting Leiter's naturalistic commitments.

First, one should remember that a naturalistic criterion for reality is not itself a guarantee of philosophical significance. There are, after all, numerous entities in the natural world, and not all of them call for a special branch of philosophy. When trying to determine which natural phenomena, and which natural facts, are relevant to the production of illumination in jurisprudence, I am therefore inclined to join several other philosophers (most notably Jules Coleman and Joseph Raz) who worry that we may not be able to do this on purely theoretical grounds. At root, what is at issue here is the right way to picture the relationship between knowledge about the world and true philosophical insight. In my view, naturalistically inclined philosophers owe some further account of this relationship if they hope to establish the validity of their proffered account of law.

Second, and relatedly, I do not believe that a naturalistically inclined philosopher can just accept Raz's view that the goal of analytic jurisprudence is to produce knowledge about the nature of law. We certainly talk about the law, and our ordinary law talk appears to be conceptually bound up with a number of other puzzling concepts like those of rules, obligations, reasons, authority, and the like. For a naturalistically inclined philosopher, it should, however, always be an empirical question whether any of these concepts (including "law") refers to something real. As Leiter clearly recognizes, the naturalistically inclined philosopher must be careful not to assert anything that presupposes the existence of any non-natural or scientifically-implausible entities. Still, one might meet this criterion not only by identifying a real natural phenomenon to call "law" but also by identifying places where our law talk fails to refer and providing a purely descriptive account of what we are doing when we engage in this talk. There are, moreover, times when philosophical illumination would appear to require such a tack, and so this tack must be considered more carefully within a larger project aimed at naturalizing jurisprudence.

In my view, Part II thus offers a first, but not necessarily the last, word on how naturalistic developments might shed light on various puzzles associated with the "what is law" question. There is, moreover, a way to find broader importance in these reflections. They should prompt a deeper and more reflective look at the relationship between three important items: namely, (1) the right criteria to guarantee that our concepts refer to something real in the natural world; (2) the appropriate philosophical goal, or point, of asking the "what is law" question; and (3) the remaining role, if any, that conceptual analysis might play in helping to attain this goal from within a purely naturalistic framework.

In Part III, Leiter enters into substantive debates in meta-ethics, and discusses the bearing of naturalism on the objectivity of moral and legal judgment. Because my focus here is on the relevance of naturalism to jurisprudence, rather than on the validity of any particular meta-ethical view, my discussion will be relatively short.

It is worth remembering that Hart himself consistently recommended trying to account for law without presupposing any controversial meta-ethical views. This recommendation may have been sound when Hart was writing, given the relatively undeveloped state of meta-ethics at the time and the narrow problems he was addressing. In recent decades, however, debates in meta-ethics have grown increasingly sophisticated, and there are now important views within jurisprudence that depend critically on how these debates are resolved. The most important such view, for present purposes, is one that directly conflicts with Leiter's naturalized account of adjudication. This is Dworkin's view that all legal questions admit of uniquely correct answers, which are to be determined by employing substantive moral insight. This view clearly presupposes that moral judgments themselves admit of uniquely correct answers, and, hence, questions of meta-ethics cannot fairly be sidestepped when assessing this view. What is a naturalist to say about this issue?

Together, the essays in Part III can be read as offering a four step argument that seeks to address this question. First, Leiter notes that some contemporary "naturalistic" moral realists have sought to understand moral properties as a distinctive class of natural properties, and have articulated the criteria needed to test for the reality of such properties. (These criteria are a refined form of the metaphysical test for reality mentioned at the beginning of this essay.) If such properties were to exist, one might vindicate the objectivity of moral judgment from within a purely naturalistic framework, but the existence of such properties is in part an empirical question. Second, Leiter canvasses the dominant accounts of such properties in the literature, which are found in the work of Peter Railton and Nicholas Sturgeon, and argues that these accounts are empirically implausible. Third, Leiter discusses several alternative, "non-natural" accounts of moral objectivity, owing primarily to Dworkin and McDowell, and criticizes their cogency. Finally, Leiter concludes that objective legal judgment cannot depend on moral judgment, and begins to develop a naturalistic account of legal objectivity that meets this constraint.

In my view, one of the most helpful aspects of Part III is that it thereby clarifies the logical relations between various issues in meta-ethics and the possibility of objective legal judgment. Leiter's discussion of naturalistic moral realism, in what I have called step one of his argument, is solid and helpful: it lays out the right tests that one must meet to justify a naturalistic form of moral realism. His arguments at step three against non-naturalistic accounts of moral objectivity depend, on the other hand, on the cogency of his underlying naturalistic commitments. These are large issues, which go beyond the scope of this review, and -- for reasons already discussed -- I have therefore chosen to assume arguendo that naturalism in some form is true. For those interested in understanding the relevance of naturalism for jurisprudence, there are nevertheless two recent developments that are worth mentioning because they bear on other parts of Leiter's argument and may affect the larger conclusions that should be drawn.

First, there is the recent development of so-called "quasi-realist" accounts of our moral language, by Allan Gibbard and Simon Blackburn most prominently. These accounts are fully consistent with Leiter's naturalistic commitments because they account for our moral language in terms of psychological attitudes that we express, but without positing any natural moral properties that purportedly explain aspects of our experience. These philosophers have nevertheless gone to great lengths to account for various other objectivist features of our moral language, including the following facts: (1) we can morally disagree in ways that are not attributable to differing beliefs about the world, and we consider these disagreements to require revision of one or another of our competing beliefs as a matter of logic; (2) we sometimes embed ethical judgments in conditionals and other more complex syntactic structures, and reason with them using the ordinary rules of logic; and (3) we take our ethical views to be responsive to at least some reasons that are poorly understood as reasons to change our descriptive beliefs about the world. Modern quasi-realists have also accepted a deflationary account of truth, and now believe that there is no further property of truth that our descriptive judgments may have that our moral judgments must lack. If this is so, then quasi-realism may offer an account of moral objectivity that is purely naturalistic but also sufficiently robust to allow for objective legal judgments to depend upon moral judgments.

Second, and now returning to naturalistic forms of moral realism proper, Leiter rightly observes that one must assess the cogency of any such views on a case by case basis. In particular, one must determine whether a given account has identified a natural property that is sufficiently related to something of moral value to count as a moral property, and whether that natural property is needed to explain various aspects of our experience in the right way. Railton and Sturgeon have sought to do this by explaining things like moral progress in terms of natural properties that arguably have the appropriate normative significance. Leiter is nevertheless concerned -- and I think rightfully so -- that these explanations may not be sufficiently compelling on their own. This is an issue that is close to my heart, because -- in The Deep Structure of Law and Morality -- I have developed a purely naturalistic account of our sense of obligation, which, I argue, is needed to explain a number of distinctive features of our social lives. Although I cannot repeat those arguments here, and although the arguments are themselves speculative, I can note that the explanation makes reference to a natural property that will have appropriate normative significance if contractualism is true. The account also explains a much more robust set of phenomena than is found in Railton's and Sturgeon's work, and does so in a coherent fashion. The account thus represents the type of work that might alter the second step of Leiter's argument in Part III, along with the appropriate conclusions to be drawn.

Regardless of the merits of this particular view, naturalistic forms of moral realism are thus still in their relative infancy: we are still developing the type of theoretical work needed to know what facts must obtain for naturalistic moral realism to be true, and we are still engaging in many of the empirical inquiries needed to answer that question. It is thus too early, in my view, to dismiss naturalistic forms of moral realism from broader debates over how to naturalize jurisprudence.

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Review: In ‘Symphony of Rats’ Revival, a Darkness Goes Underexplored

The Wooster Group’s staging of Richard Foreman’s play operates like a delightful love letter from one giant of experimental theater to another.

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By Jason Zinoman

A president losing grip with reality. Warnings of environmental disaster and apocalypse. An early reference to the Covid vaccine.

The Wooster Group’s revival of the deliriously trippy “Symphony of Rats,” a Richard Foreman play from 1988 that originally starred Kate Valk, who directs this production along with Elizabeth LeCompte, invites dark topical readings. It’s an election year, after all.

So why does this production feel so sweet and escapist?

For one thing, the vaudevillian madness onstage — which juxtaposes twee songs with violent video, highbrow with Hollywood, the mundane with the alien — does not build on its political subject matter. It’s only the surface of a far weirder, digressive production whose obsession is not with the real world but what is underneath. The President (a suitably intense Ari Fliakos) does not stand in for any specific politician, and can come off as an ordinary figure overwhelmed by events. In one of the show’s many dreamy lines, he says, “I seemed to have returned from a profound experience of elsewhereness.”

This is what it felt like to return from a new play by Richard Foreman, who stopped making new shows a decade ago. And for the theater fans who mourn his loss from the cultural landscape, this Wooster Group show operates like a delightful love letter, from one giant of experimental theater to another.

Foreman didn’t break traditional rules of narrative or character so much as invent his own. His surreal shows existed in their own meticulously realized world, whose distinctive designs were bisected by wires that turned the stage into a web. The mood was somehow both menacing and playful, its meaning ineffable and the overall effect entirely singular. Asked in a 2020 interview if he would ever make new work, he balked and then said exactly what you would want the éminence grise of the avant-garde to say: “We are living in decadent times, surrounded by nothing but trash.”

“Symphony” has hints of such flamboyant gloom. The President is presented as a puppet (even his bowel movements are performed with assistance), and the stage is filled with rodents — some small (look out for creepy props), others the size of the wonderful actor Jim Fletcher, whose sharp nails and dramatic flair project an otherworldly deadpan.

The dominant theme here isn’t these animals so much as alternative realities, whether it be an alien world, a “mirror mind,” a lozenge that when eaten takes you — “Alice in Wonderland” style — to a magical land.

That’s not even getting into Tornadoville. LeCompte, whose video-game-like production designs are consistently playful, nods to the Foreman aesthetic: the cluttered set, transparent panes, the wires. But the Wooster Group is more technologically and pop culture savvy. Yudam Hyung Seok Jeon’s video work is elaborate and abstract, with references to “Star Wars” or a John Cena movie, and a re-creation of a famously balletic scene from Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” is performed with grace by Fletcher and Fliakos.

There’s a conspiratorial streak in this play that this production doesn’t do much with, a darkness that goes underexplored. Its rodents do not seem to represent exploitation and corruption so much as the assumption that the world is too bizarre for realism, too cracked for happy endings or closure. At the end, Fletcher seems to address the need for some coherence, speaking into a microphone: “Is it possible that all of you out there were participating in a detective story?” Then he adds bluntly: “Here’s what happened.”

Don’t be fooled. What follows is a yarn complemented by a cooking show where we see the torso of a woman turn excrement into chocolate chip cookies — one of several gross-out moments aimed at the gut rather than the head. It’s a show that reminds us that just because art aims to disorient doesn’t mean that it is a puzzle to be solved.

Symphony of Rats Through May 4 at the Performing Garage, Manhattan; thewoostergroup.org . Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes.

Jason Zinoman is a critic at large for the Culture section of The Times and writes a column about comedy. More about Jason Zinoman