O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape:The Alienation of the American Anti-hero
Abstract
Roughly speaking, realism was a movement that originated in Europe around the 1850s. It represented a reaction against Romanticism. Realists proposed to depict reality as it was, that is to say, art should be an exact imitation of life. Naturalism, we may say, was basically a radicalization of realism. It was in fashion approximately from the 1870s till the 1910s. Naturalism was a social response to Darwinism in science, positivism of Auguste Compte in philosophy and the Industrial Revolution in economy. In realism, the artists were worried about form, thus, they chose themes that could interest the reader of the time such as melodramatic love stories, mainly dealing with the upper classes.
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