English-Chinese Translation.(上海大学2004研,考试科目:综合英语)The Rise of RealismBetween the work of Hawthorne and Melville, the major novelists of the 1850s, and the work of Twain, James and Howells, the major novelists of the last quarter of the century, falls the shadow of the American Civil War(1861 -1865). In his famous Gettysburg address Abraham Lincoln described the conflict in terms of epic simplicity:Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers set forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether this nation, or any other nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. In the , the war showed that the nation could endure—but only in a permanently changed and, in some respects, a deeply scarred form.The result of the Civil War was not just the triumph of the abolitionists over the slave-owners. It was also the triumph of the industrial North over the agrarian South. Despite the much-vaunted program of" Reconstruction" , the Southern states long remained ravaged and dispirited territory: the war left a legacy of bitterness that has not yet disappeared from American politics. In the North, on the other hand, the aftermath of war brought financial boom. The North"s prosperity was increased by rapid mechanization and industrialization, its population swelled by new influxes of foreign immigrants. To contemporary observers cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Chicago presented a double image. On the suce there was elegance, security and comfort: but underneath there was all the seething discontent which accompanies the growth of any modern industrial society.
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