American Literature / Unit 19 AML 1819 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Drill 5: What Jewett, Chopin, and Twain Are Called
The idea
The board asks what Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin and Mark Twain are all sometimes called, offering romantics, modernists, regionalists, transcendentalists and naturalists. The answer is regionalists. The common factor is place: Jewett wrote coastal Maine, Chopin wrote Louisiana and its Creole and Cajun communities, Twain wrote the Mississippi valley, and each rendered a local dialect and local custom closely. The distractors fail on dates and on method. Romanticism and transcendentalism belong to the period before the Civil War. Modernism belongs to the twentieth century. Naturalism is the closest in time, but it is defined by heredity and environment as overwhelming forces, and that is a different claim from close attention to a place.
In practice
Three writers, three places, one label.
Where people slip
Naturalism is the trap, because it is the other post-war label. Regionalism is about where a story is set and how its people speak; naturalism is about what determines them.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Unlocks
- Nothing yet depends on this.
Something wrong in this lesson? Flag it