Unit 7 American Literature
Introduction :American literature has recorded the story of a quest ,at different times the quest has taken different forms( e.g. from the 16th century, at times the quest was a religious pilgrimage.)
Early Fiction
(1775-1781, the War of Independence)
The post revolutionary works


Rip Van
James Fenimore Cooper:
the Spy ;
The leatherstocking Tales :
The pioneers(1823),the Last
Mohicans (1826),The Prairie(1827),
The Pathfinder(1840) and The Deer
slayer
Transcendentalists:was a form of idealism ,or philosophical Romanticism,Emerson claimed that by studying and responding to nature individuals could reach a high spiritual state without formal religion.
Ralph Emerson: Nature 
Henry David Thoreau:Walden
Power of Imagination
These writers were concentrating upon human imagination and emotion rather than the intellect
Edgar Allan Poe:The Masque of Red Death ,
The Fall of the House of Usher


Nathaniel Hawthorne: Twice-Told Tale ,The Scarlet Letter, ( rich in symbolism,his way of rebelling against the traditional New England outlook on life, explore certain moral theme such as guilt ,pride and emotional repression)
     

Moby Dick(to profound theme such as fate ,the nature of evil ,the individual’s struggle against the universe
 
(It is considered  an American masterpiece )
 
New Vision of America
Mississippi River-The
   Old-man River

.Bird-View of the Mississippi River 
New Vision of America
Walt Whitman(1818-1892)  : Leaves of Grass 
He celebrated the American landscape ,the American people , their speech and democratic form of government .

Reform and Liberation
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Anti-slavery novel that galvanized political opinion across the nation ,the slavery question became a passionately debated political issue.) The ending of Civil War is the marks abolition of slavery in the United State
Regionalism
As the civil war dimmed American optimism ,writers retreated from national theme ,they now focused on the different between the various regions of the United State rather than a dingle vision of the expanding country, this is the Regionalism movement
William Dean Howell(1837-1920) : The Luck of Roaring Camp (describing  local life realistically)

Mark Twain
Samuel Clemens
 _Mark Twain:
  A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (in a imaginative way)


A New Wave
Naturalism :As the wounds of the Civil War slowly healed regional writer began to drop their narrow provincial focus,they put their eyes on the grimmer aspect of reality and a deterministic  view of life , describing  realistic  everyday life .They Linked them with European naturalists such as French novelist Zola .The most reprehensive naturalists in the American literature are:
William Dean Howells : The Rise of Silas Laphan (1885)
Stephen Crane : Maggie ,A Girle of the Streets ;The Red Badge of Courage
Theodore Dreiser(1874-1945)   Sister Carrie,
Upton Sinclair: The Jungle
Sister Carrie
In volume one of Dreiser's autobiography, Dawn, he remembers scavenging along the railroad tracks for coal for the family stove; but he testifies also to the joyful sensuality of his child's feelings for life and the natural world around him.
Jack London : Call of the Wild 
Henry James : The Wing of the Dove ,The Ambassador and The Golden Bowl
Edith Wharton (1862-1937): The House of Mirth, The Age of Innocence
 
 
The call of wild
London expressed his sense that primitive urges underline all life ,reduce even humans to the level of animals
Naturalism: a style of art and literature in which where is faithful representation of real life.
(In Philosophy , theory that reject the supernatural and claims that natural causes and laws explain everything)


Sympathetic View

Kate Chopin: The Awakening(1899)
Willa Cather :O Pioneers!
(depicts life on the sweeping plains of midwestern Nebraska)
W.E.B.Dubois: Soul of Black (a seroes pf sketches of the common lives of his people  which was the dirst glimpse many white Americans has had of the social condition of blacks since slavery.)
Rebellious Spirit
Sherwood Anderson: Winesburg Ohio
O Pioneers!


O Pioneers depicts life on the sweeping plains of Midwestern Nebraska .It begins like this:
 “One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away. A mist of fine snowflakes was curling and eddying about the cluster of low drab buildings huddled on the gray prai…”
Sinclair Lewis : the first American was awarded the Noble Prize for Literature
Main Street,  Gopher Prairie, Rabbit and Arrowsmith(He drew vivid caricatures and satirized the traditional “American dream ”of success)

The Modernism
The term modernism refers to the radical shift in aesthetic and cultural sensibilities evident in the art and literature of the post-World War One period. The ordered, stable and inherently meaningful world view of the nineteenth century could not, wrote T.S. Eliot, accord with “the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.”


Modernism thus marks a distinctive break with Victorian bourgeois morality; rejecting nineteenth-century optimism, they presented a profoundly pessimistic picture of a culture in disarray. This despair often results in an apparent apathy and moral relativism.
In literature, the movement is associated with the works of (among others) Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Franz Kafka and Knut Hamsun. In their attempt to throw off the aesthetic burden of the realist novel, these writers introduced a variety of literary tactics and devices:




bourgeois morality; rejecting nineteenth-century optimism, they presented a profoundly pessimistic picture of a culture in disarray. This despair often results in an apparent apathy and moral relativism.



Modernism is often derided for abandoning the social world in favour of its narcissistic interest in language and its processes. Recognizing the failure of language to ever fully communicate meaning ("That's not it at all, that's not what I meant at all" laments Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock), the modernists generally downplayed content in favour of an investigation of form. The fragmented, non-chronological, poetic forms utilized by Eliot and Pound revolutionized poetic language.


T.S.Eliot: The Waste Land(1922)( 6 language ) .The famous musical play 《The Cat 》  from his poetry 《Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats》
 
E.E.Coming
Wallace Steven
William Carlos Williams
Lost Generation
In the aftermath of World War 1,many novelists produced a literature of disillusionment (captured the restless. Pleasure-hungry ,defiant mood of the 1920). Some lived abroad . They were as the “Lost Generation ”.The two most reprehensive writers of the Lost Generation were Hemingway and Fitzgerald
F.Scott Fitzgerald:The Great Gatsby, 
Ernest Hemingway:The Sun also Rises(1926),A Farewell to Arms, For Whom The Bell Tolls(1940)
William Faulkner:The Sound and the Fury, Light August

THE GREAT GATSBY
Fitzgerald’s great theme expressed poignantly, was ofyouth’s golden dreams turning to disappointment
Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway adopted moral code exalting simple survival and the basic values of strength ,courage and honesty

Harlem Renaissance
The 1920s saw the rise of an artistic black community centered in Harlem,a black neighborhood in New York city . Magazines and newspapers dedicated to the black writing sprang up in Harlem. Black poets such as Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen wrote about what meant to be black. The Harlem Renaissance gave African-American culture prominence and an impetus to grow, for they brought a lively ,powerful music jazz with them .
 
New Drama
At this time The writers borrowed ideas from European playwrights,like the modernists,they adapted the approach –symbolism,stories from classical mythology and the Bible,and drew upon the new science of psychology to explore the inner lives of people.Dramatic style was produced
O’neill: Desire Under the Elms(1924),Mourning becomes Electra(1931),The Iceman Cometh(1946,Long Day’s Journey into Night(1956))
Depression ,Realism and Escapism
The Depression caused novelist to focus on social forces (in1930).
John Steinbeck : The Grapes of Wrath
Margaret Mitchell:Gone with the Wind
Norman Mailer: The Naked and Dead
Herman Wouk: Caine Mutiny
Joseph Heller: Catch –22  (the beginning of Black Humor)