Comparison Novels Flashcards
Richard Wright’s Native Son
1940 - Naturalism
The story of 20-year-old Bigger Thomas, an African American youth living in utter poverty in a poor area on Chicago’s South Side in the 1930s who ends up accidentally smothering a rich white girl going on to commit more crimes to hide it. While not apologizing for Bigger’s crimes, Wright portrays a systemic inevitability behind them and the cruel way African Americans were treated.
Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle
1906 - Naturalism
The main character in the book is Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant trying to make ends meet in Chicago. Sinclair wrote the novel to portray the harsh conditions and exploited lives of immigrants in the United States in Chicago and similar industrialized cities.
Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms
1929 - Modernism
Set during the Italian campaign of World War I it is a first-person account of an American, Frederic Henry, serving as a lieutenant in the ambulance corps of the Italian Army. The novel conveys clear disillusionment with war and characteristics of the lost generation.
Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour
1894 - social realism
Louise Mallard, hears that her husband is dead, and when she discovers that he is alive after all she dies of shock. Featuring a female protagonist who feels liberation at the news of her husband’s death, “The Story of an Hour” was controversial by American standards of the 1890s.
Kate Chopin’s The Unexpected
1895 - social realism Doretha runs away when her sick fiance when he comes back to her. Chopin again conveys how upper-class women have little freedom.
F Scott Fitzgerald’s A Diamond as Big as the Ritz
1922 - realism A novella about John T Unger a middle-class boy visiting an extremely wealthy family for the summer who still have slaves and murder all that have visited to protect their fortune. Fitzgerald portrays the wealthy as delusional and animalistic.
William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily
1930 - modernism/ Southern gothic The short story focuses on Emily Grierson, an upper-class woman in the south, who ends up killing her husband and sleeping next to him for years. The story highlights the corrupt antebellum era, shows the past as not as romantic as America portrays it.
Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God
1937 - Harlem Renaissance
The novel explores main character Janie Crawford’s “ripening from a vibrant, but voiceless, teenage girl into a woman with her finger on the trigger of her own destiny.” It also portrays the reality of black communities and how women were treated.
Richard Wright’s Bigger Leaves Home
1938 - Naturalism
The story of Big Boy, a young black whose youthful excursion goes horribly wrong after going swimming in a pool naked with his friends and a white woman seeing them thinks they’ll attack her. Wright portrays the completely humanising way black people were treated in the South.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter
1850 - Romanticism
Set in Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony during the years 1642 to 1649, the novel tells the story of Hester Prynne who conceives a daughter through an affair and then struggles to create a new life of repentance and dignity. The book explores themes of legalism, sin, gender, and guilt.
Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers
1927 - modernist
The basic plot of the story involves a pair of criminals who enter a restaurant seeking to kill a boxer, a Swede named Ole Andreson, who is hiding out for reasons unknown, possibly for winning a fight. It explores violence, gangs and race.
