Stephen Crane's Maggie

Seminar paper from the year 2002 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 2,0, University of Hannover (Englisches Seminar), course: Progressivism, Modernity, and the 'New Woman' - US-Literature and Culture, 1880-1910", 8 entries in the bibliography, language: English, comment: Stephen Crane's first novel, Maggie - A Girl of the Streets (1893), is a characteristic specimen of Naturalist or New Realist Literature. The plot is quite different from Victorian Realist literature as well as the Symbolist literature by the likes of Kipling and T.S. Eliott. In fact, Crane purposely wanted to get away from that sort of writing as he states in one of his letters: 'If I had kept to my clever Rudyard-Kipling style, the road might have been shorter but it wouldn't be true." , abstract: Stephen Crane's first novel, Maggie - A Girl of the Streets (1893), is a characteristic
specimen of Naturalist or New Realist Literature. The plot is quite different from Victorian
Realist literature as well as the Symbolist literature by the likes of Kipling and T.S. Eliott. In
fact, Crane purposely wanted to get away from that sort of writing as he states in one of his
letters: "If I had kept to my clever Rudyard -Kipling style, the road might have been shorter
but, ah, it wouldn't be the true road." While the early Realists still concentrated on people
from the middle class upward, Crane's characters belonged to the lowest scale in terms of
social standing. This meant that the young author had to break with some taboos installed by
Victorian writers and as a result from that, he had difficulties in publishing the novel in the
first place and also received a lot of hostility from critics.
The most basic feature that distinguishes Maggie: A Girl of the Streets from Symbolist or
Aestheticist works is its focus on the concept of 'truth'. For Symbolist authors, the highest
principle of art was 'beauty' whereas Naturalists saw the need of objective descriptions of life
and nature in ord