A Cultural Study Of The Characters In Winesburg, Ohio

Winesburg, Ohio is the representative work of the famous American writer Sherwood Anderson. In this work, based on his own experiences when he was in Clyde, Ohio, Anderson described vividly the life of a group of American small-town citizens with grotesque psychology. The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the characters in Winesburg, Ohio. Although the characters represent the average American people who live in the small town, each character shows that they have dreamed of having a better life in different ways. Their dreams never come true due to the limitation of their reality which influences their dreams during the Great Depression Era. The analysis reveals that Anderson emphasized the impossibility of dreams under circumstances of materialism. In the core of this thesis, inspired by the sense of the conflict between materialism, reality and creative imagination of people who live in a small town, cultural study and the psychoanalysis will be used to analyze the characters.