I would say either A or B but personally i would go with B.
This is called figurative language.
Answer:
B. With the onset of industrial and scientific advances, Americans no longer believed in the supernatural.
Explanation:
The civil war created a bad reality and very different from the prosperity that the United States had witnessed before it. Because of the civil war, an economic crisis, supply problems, a strong political polarization and many violent events were created. This caused American writers to try to escape the national reality, and to create a world out of the emisious destruction that the war provided, besides, they wanted to move away from the romanticism present in the literature of the time and this stimulated the creation of realistic American literature.
