explain this like a highchooler
The Civil War was a traumatic and destructive conflict that remains the bloodiest war in US history. Realism began around the end of the war in 1865. Rejecting romantic-era ideals that focused on allegorical characters, symbolic settings, and dramatic subjects, realism depicted ordinary people in everyday situations.
What aspects of the Civil War might have caused this dramatic shift in style, form, and thematic discourse in American literature?
The Civil War was a big, messy war that had a lot of bad stuff happen, like a ton of people getting killed. After the war ended, a new style of writing called realism started to become popular. Realism was different from the old romantic style that used characters and settings that were like symbols, and had really intense and crazy stories. Realism was all about showing regular people in regular situations.
So, why did this change happen? Well, the Civil War was a pretty traumatic event for the whole country. It was super violent and destructive, so it makes sense that people might want to start writing about more down-to-earth stuff. They probably wanted to focus on the everyday struggles and experiences that people were going through, instead of these big, dramatic stories.
Basically, the war messed things up so much that people wanted to write about real life and real people, and that's how realism became a big thing in American literature.