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Stepnen Crane (1871-1900) Stephen Crane followed William Dean Howells onto the postbellum scene with his first novel,
Maggie, A Girl of the Streets, which was published in 1893. The novel was a gritty, depressing example of realism literature that depicted a girl who turns to prostitution after her family turns her away. Howells praised its portrayal of realism, but other critics found it disturbing and appalling. Crane followed up with his most famous novel,
The Red Badge of Courage (1895), which illuminated the horrors of the Civil War beneath a light of realism, not romanticism.
Crane had a fascination, if not obsession, with war and naturally it was the Civil War that provided the milieu for his acclaimed novel. His passion for war did not encompass politics, nor even cause and consequence; his intrigue stemmed from the battles’ effect on the human psyche - the violence, pain, suffering, and death. Critics are quick to identify his lack of political\social subjectivity in The Red Badge of Courage: “Negroes and Lincoln and hospitals and prisons are not to be found in Crane’s theater; these and other matters were irrelevant to his main concern – the nature of war and what happens to people who engage in it.”1 Crane’s concern, then, was far removed from that of his realist counterpart, Howells. Howells did praise The Red Badge of Courage, but it was not aimed at the novel’s realistic prowess. The novel blatantly betrayed the credo of Howells’s realism by first depicting the war in a literal (as opposed to metonymic) sense and secondly by failing to address issues of postbellum American life. Howells defended his realism principles by attacking Crane’s novel and labeling it “impressionistic.” Others argue that Crane’s novel elucidation of a soldier’s war experience, absent of even a glint of romanticism, validates him as a true realism author. In reality, Crane was far less concerned with how his literature was dissected than was Howells. His main purpose was to express his passionate distaste for war through unabashed art devoid of constraints imposed by literary movements and their advocates.
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