By the end of this course, you will be familiar If we understand the past, we are more likely to recognise what is happening around us. In contrast, John Updike approached American life from a more reflective but no less subversive perspective. Inspired by Hawthorne's focus on allegories and psychology, Melville went on to write romances replete with philosophical speculation. New England was not the only area in the colonies with a literature: southern literature was also growing at this time. [16] This is for the student. They included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.. Longfellow achieved the highest level of acclaim and is often considered the first internationally acclaimed American poet, being the first American poet given a bust in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner. A brief video introduction to the question "What Is American Literature?" Contributor Names Painter, F. V. N. (Franklin Verzelius Newton), 1852-1931. He also jumbled time sequences to show how the past – especially the slave-holding era of the Deep South – endures in the present. / Are you nobody too?" A devout Catholic, O'Connor often imbued her stories, among them the widely studied "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and "Everything That Rises Must Converge", and two novels, Wise Blood (1952); The Violent Bear It Away (1960), with deeply religious themes, focusing particularly on the search for truth and religious skepticism against the backdrop of the nuclear age. Bellow went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. Journalistic critics, including Ida M. Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens, were labeled "The Muckrakers". [31] (Main-Travelled Roads (1891), Prairie Folks (1892), Jason Edwards (1892).[32]). Edward Winslow also recorded a diary of the first years after the Mayflower's arrival. His novels are noted for achieving both commercial and critical success, several of his works having been adapted to film. Charlotte Temple is a seduction tale, written in the third person, which warns against listening to the voice of love and counsels resistance. We will read from a wide range of American literature using the most recent (9th), shorter, two- volume edition of The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Colden also wrote a book on botany, which attracted the attention of Carl Linnaeus, and he maintained a long term correspondence with Benjamin Franklin. Steinbeck often wrote about poor, working-class people and their struggle to lead a decent and honest life. The inspiration that a writer requires to write a thesis on American literature is often influenced by … His characters speak like real people and sound distinctively American, using local dialects, newly invented words, and regional accents. Just like all other national literature, the literature of America was shaped by the historical experiences of the country that produced it. Many writers had direct experience of the First World War, and they used it to frame their writings. One of her finest books, The Age of Innocence (1920), centers on a man who chooses to marry a conventional, socially acceptable woman rather than a fascinating outsider. Literature written or related to the United States, Ethnic, African American and Native American writers, Ethnic, African American, LGBT & Native American writers, Nobel Prize in Literature winners (American authors), Regional and minority focuses in American literature, Henry L. Schoolcraft, "The Capture of New Amsterdam,", the Bay Psalm Book exhibition at the Library of Congress 2015, Parker, Patricia L. "Charlotte Temple by Susanna Rowson. In the next decade important women writers also published novels. Major writers include Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville. Henry Brooks Adams's literate autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams (1907) also depicted a stinging description of the education system and modern life. Similarly, Sui Sin Far wrote about Chinese-American experiences, and Maria Cristina Mena wrote about Mexican-American experiences. The narrator of Invisible Man has been rendered invisible by his race, but Ellison’s novel is much more than an account of the experience of racism; it is an odyssey into African-American identity, moving between the South to Harlem for a full-bodied portrait of black community, the legacy of slavery, radical politics, and Dostoyevskian alienation. Catherine Maria Sedgwick wrote A New England Tale in 1822, Redwood in 1824, Hope Leslie in 1827, and The Linwoods in 1835. In the postwar period, the art of the short story again flourished. As one of the great works of the Revolutionary period was written by a Frenchman, so too was a work about America from this generation. More recently, Arab American literature, largely unnoticed since the New York Pen League of the 1920s, has become more prominent through the work of Diana Abu-Jaber, whose novels include Arabian Jazz and Crescent and the memoir The Language of Baklava. "An Assault on the Will: Republican Virtue and the City in Hannah Webster Foster's 'The Coquette'. Two key figures were Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine. Before the founding of the United States, the British colonies on the eastern coast of the present-day United States were heavily influenced by English literature. And in Sister Carrie (1900), Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945) portrayed a country girl who moves to Chicago and becomes a kept woman. Chinese-American author Ha Jin in 1999 won the National Book Award for his second novel, Waiting, about a Chinese soldier in the Revolutionary Army who has to wait 18 years to divorce his wife for another woman, all the while having to worry about persecution for his protracted affair, and twice won the PEN/Faulkner Award, in 2000 for Waiting and in 2005 for War Trash. One of the best-selling and most acclaimed novels in American history, Beloved follows escaped slave Sethe who flees her Kentucky plantation of Sweet Home for Ohio with her daughter, vowing to save her from slavery at all costs; the consequences haunt Sethe and her family across generations, making Beloved a ghost story, but one in which the unquiet specter of slavery pursues the African-American community, imprinting Morrison’s themes of fragmented identity on readers everywhere. The story of two families striving for success in the lush Salinas Valley, East of Eden mostly centers on Cyrus Trask, a Civil War veteran who settles in the valley and embarks on a series of impractical schemes. Seizing on the distinctly postmodern techniques of digression, narrative fragmentation and elaborate symbolism, and strongly influenced by the works of Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace began his writing career with The Broom of the System, published to moderate acclaim in 1987. The diary of William Byrd and his The History of the Dividing Line (1728) described the expedition to survey the swamp between Virginia and North Carolina but also comments on the differences between American Indians and the white settlers in the area. Thomas Pynchon, a seminal practitioner of the form, drew in his work on modernist fixtures such as temporal distortion, unreliable narrators, and internal monologue and coupled them with distinctly postmodern techniques such as metafiction, ideogrammatic characterization, unrealistic names (Oedipa Maas, Benny Profane, etc. Unable to choose between them, she finds herself single when both men get married. European styles were frequently imitated, but critics usually considered the imitations inferior. Contributor Names Painter, F. V. N. (Franklin Verzelius Newton), 1852-1931. Other writers interested in regional differences and dialect were George W. Cable, Thomas Nelson Page, Joel Chandler Harris, Mary Noailles Murfree (Charles Egbert Craddock), Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Henry Cuyler Bunner, and William Sydney Porter (O. Henry). ", Hamilton, Kristie. [33] Writers like Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and poets Ezra Pound, H.D. 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