Wed, Feb 13 Maggie, Girl of the Streets

In class: vocabulary quiz from How the Other Half Lives
              review of Other Half
Due Friday: Thanatopsis essay

For Monday, February 25.......Maggie, Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane.   class handout; link below   For each chapter, please write a 50 word reflection. This my be in refence to the development of a character, a personal connection, an aspect of the plot or setting or an extension beyond the text. These should be well-written, using the conventions of standard English.
Thursday and Friday this week.  The class is participating in a federal grant project. Your knowledge of Riis' How the Other Half Lives will tie directly into this work.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/447/447-h/447-h.htm

On the Monday we return from break, you will be writing an alternative ending to the story. In order to do so, you will need to understand this short novel.

Stephen Crane

1871–1900


Stephen Crane was one of America's foremost realistic writers, and his works have been credited with marking the beginning of modern American Naturalism. His Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage (1895) is a classic of American literature that realistically depicts the psychological complexities of fear and courage on the battlefield. Crane utilized his keen observations, as well as personal experiences, to achieve a narrative vividness and sense of immediacy matched by few American writers before him. While The Red Badge of Courage is acknowledged as his masterpiece, Crane's novella Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) is also acclaimed as an important work in the development of literary Naturalism.
    In 1893 Crane privately published his first novella, Maggie, under a pseudonym after several publishers rejected the work on the grounds that his description of slum realities would shock readers. According to Crane, Maggie "tries to show that environment is a tremendous thing in the world and frequently shapes lives regardless." Critics suggest that the novel was a major development in American literary Naturalism and that it introduced Crane's vision of life as warfare: influenced by the Darwinism of the times, Crane viewed individuals as victims of purposeless forces and believed that they encountered only hostility in their relationships with other individuals, with society, with nature, and with God. Also prominent in his first novel is an ironic technique that exposes the hypocrisy of moral tenets when they are set against the sordid reality of slum life.