Yeah, that's true to a degree, but not nearly as much as we'd like to think, it was actually more true in England than America. Like film today, novels have always generally been considered the lesser art form... and of course the invention of the dime-store novel didn't help. But most of the greats of this time, were still all primarily novelists.
Poetry and drama is not only rare during this time in America, it isn't very good, the last two great American poets before we get into the twentieth century were Walt Whitman and Emily Dickenson, and she became more well known posthumously. Howells, Henry James, Kate Chopin, even Mark Twain tried their hands at drama, and they all failed, more or less miserably. Crane was recognized for some really good poetry... but his much greater claim to fame is a lot of his short fiction and of course _The Red Badge of Courage_.
But, yeah, like I said, what makes the men stand out more during this time is they were also critics and writers of letters and essays talking about the "important" issues as you put it. Twain, for example, was hugely prolific and famous--travelled all over the country speaking, doing stand-up comedy routines. And, like I said, Howells, James, Frank Norris, all wrote their own "manifestos" on the importance of the novel, the value of it as a democratic art form, even Norris wrote a long essay titled "The Responsibility of the Novelist," where he declared the novelist as the spokesman for the masses, the champion of the commmon inner-city street dweller. This was considered an extremely important turn within written artistic enterprise. They were anti-romantic, mostly professional journalists who wanted to see the novel take on that "true," objective, journalistic quality... very much like our "reality" TV. They pushed for the more, no-holds-barred, grotesque depictions of real life. The interesting thing that I was getting at, is that there are novels that are already doing this long before they became champions of these stylistic priorities, some of them women... but it's Howell's, James and Twain, with follow-ups like Norris, Crane and Jack London who are given most of the credit. Not that they didn't champion the style and change of direction... it's just another example of our selective memory.
What really attacked the novel, and declared it more of the "fluff" art, actually occured in an entirely different and future generation well after the realist movement, and that would be the New Critics and Modernists of the early twentieth century, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, who not only brought back poetry to the United States, but made it incredibly complex, sophisticated, and extremely difficult, if not nausiating at times to read. Pound and Eliot felt literature was a serious discipline that required training in order to understand... average folk couldn't do it.
Poetry and drama is not only rare during this time in America, it isn't very good, the last two great American poets before we get into the twentieth century were Walt Whitman and Emily Dickenson, and she became more well known posthumously. Howells, Henry James, Kate Chopin, even Mark Twain tried their hands at drama, and they all failed, more or less miserably. Crane was recognized for some really good poetry... but his much greater claim to fame is a lot of his short fiction and of course _The Red Badge of Courage_.
But, yeah, like I said, what makes the men stand out more during this time is they were also critics and writers of letters and essays talking about the "important" issues as you put it. Twain, for example, was hugely prolific and famous--travelled all over the country speaking, doing stand-up comedy routines. And, like I said, Howells, James, Frank Norris, all wrote their own "manifestos" on the importance of the novel, the value of it as a democratic art form, even Norris wrote a long essay titled "The Responsibility of the Novelist," where he declared the novelist as the spokesman for the masses, the champion of the commmon inner-city street dweller. This was considered an extremely important turn within written artistic enterprise. They were anti-romantic, mostly professional journalists who wanted to see the novel take on that "true," objective, journalistic quality... very much like our "reality" TV. They pushed for the more, no-holds-barred, grotesque depictions of real life. The interesting thing that I was getting at, is that there are novels that are already doing this long before they became champions of these stylistic priorities, some of them women... but it's Howell's, James and Twain, with follow-ups like Norris, Crane and Jack London who are given most of the credit. Not that they didn't champion the style and change of direction... it's just another example of our selective memory.
What really attacked the novel, and declared it more of the "fluff" art, actually occured in an entirely different and future generation well after the realist movement, and that would be the New Critics and Modernists of the early twentieth century, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, who not only brought back poetry to the United States, but made it incredibly complex, sophisticated, and extremely difficult, if not nausiating at times to read. Pound and Eliot felt literature was a serious discipline that required training in order to understand... average folk couldn't do it.
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