The 4-page paper should deal with realism as a literary genre, and focus on a particular work as an example. Realism, in a sense, is an attempt to distinguish the “real” from the “constructed.” In literary terms, realism as a genre attempted to show how U.S. culture works in real terms, as opposed to the terms invented in Romanticism. Your purpose, then, is to find value in a work of realism and to show how that work of realism provides an authentic view of life in the U.S., or how it fails to do so. Your thesis statement might take the shape of “[Work of Realism] illustrates the situations of people who lived in City X by doing ______________.” You should use Stephen Crane’s novel “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets” to begin developing an answer regarding the value in realism as a genre. You must use at least one academic source in the writing of this paper.