American Literature

Linda Mkhitaryan
1 December 2021

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 It's quite odd that if you look at the earlier times American literature was
always a way for visionaries to experiment with the language and way of
writing and storytelling in a world where that was quite an outstanding and
never-seen-before phenomenon. Writers like Burroughs and Ginsberg, Plath
and some of the other outstanding writers of the late 20th century were all
severely criticised and considered outcasts and revolutionaries in a bad
sense of that word.
However let's start from the colonial and Early National period instead.
The irst European settlers of North America wrote about their experiences
starting in the 1600s. This was the earliest American literature: practical,
straightforward, often derivative of literature in Great Britain, and focused on
the future.The irst European settlers of North America wrote about their
experiences starting in the 1600s. This was the earliest American literature:
practical, straightforward, often derivative of literature in Great Britain, and
focused on the future. In its early days during the 1600's, American literature
was mostly of practical non iction written by British settlers who populated
the colonies that would become the United States. John Smith wrote
histories of Virginia based on his experiences as an English explorer and a
president of the Jamestown Colony. Published in 1608 and 1624 these are
among the earliest works in American Literature. Another era began when
America declared its independence in 1776 and much new writing addressed
the country's future. American poetry and iction were largely modeled on
what was being published overseas in Great Britain, and much of what
American readers consumed also came from Great Britain. Benjamin
Franklin's autobiography which he wrote during the 1700's and 80s shaped
what is now called a quintessential American life story. The irst American
novel "The Power of Sympathy" by William Hill Brown, was published in 1789.
The American romantic period also called "The American Renaissance" which
started in the 1830 and lasted for about 40 years ending in the 1870s was one
of the more interesting periods in American literature and honored
individualism, intuition and imagination. The improbability in the stories and
writing was quite a requirement in this type of literature. Usually identi ied as
the characteristics of this type of literature were the following:
1. Individualism
2. Seeing the common man as a hero
3. Looking back in the past for wisdom
4. Escapism in the form of imagination
5. Nature as a source of wisdom and spirituality

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 Lets also not forget that in all literature the main source or if I may say so the
reason for it is usually the surroundings. During this period of time the
American industrial revolution was taking place and everything was changing
and growing. Many people due to that tried to escape that. Therefore the
American romantic writers were seeking that through escapism, by taking us
places that are extremely beautiful, usually to the countryside. Places that
have improbable or supernatural views and sceneries. One of these writers is
Washington Irving who is considered the father of American lit. Wrote a story
called "Rip Van Winkle" a story about a man that wanders away into the
woods to escape his daily chores but falls asleep in the woods for 20 years.
This is actually still seen in modern storytelling and even screenwriting. The
necessity for this kind of writing continues after the big wave of immigration
begins in America and never stops afterward. Due to this phenomenon
individualism comes forward as a necessary source of self identi ication and
thanks to that gives the entire country an identity. People from di erent pasts
and upbringing, even di erent cultures come together as one to create a
new and improved sense of not only life but reality itself.The need to separate
themselves from Europe and create their own way of thinking also played a
major role in American literature of that decade. The need to become
intellectually independent is seen throughout the whole period. Taking this
into consideration the 5th point which is nature as a source of spirituality.
Considering irst puritans arrived to America in order to escape religious
prosecution in England because of their ideas, these same people now
embrace this spiritual root and taking what was established and turning it
into nature. Though the puritans believed the devil was in nature the
romantics took that idea and turned in on its head. They thought that they
can ind god by seeking and observing the world around them. Something
still practiced by a lot of young people today. One of the biggest examples of
this is William C. Bryant. Someone who explores death through the life cycle
of nature. In his writing the ideas of death are explored as not an end but a
chance to go back where we came from- nature. An honorable mention
would be Ralph Waldo Emerson, an American essayist that said "We have
listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe". He began the American
intellectual declaration of independence. He strongly believed that nature is
in us and we are all linked in an endless cycle. One of the things he is most
famous for is that he, after meeting two of the most outstanding minds of

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 those centuries, the English romantic poets Samuel T. Coleridge and William
Wordsworth. He was quite disappointed by this meeting since he found
them rather dry and ordinary. Hence the great conclusion "If great men can
be so ordinary, why cant ordinary men be great?"
The third main point is that the romantics tended, even though quite new
ideas were introduced, to turn to the past as a source of great wisdom.
Writers like Washington Irving would take old English stories and legends and
retell them in a new way. However this is not seen in all writers of that age
since the short story writers were still distancing themselves from the
European traditions and customs, poets like James Russel Lowell stick to the
tradition and turn it into something that has the same form of storytelling and
technique however truly unique in the content and actual meaning, taking
the pure nature America has to o er and turning it into inspiration. These
poets were called the "Fireside Poets". A group of likeminded people sitting
by the ire and reading their favorite stories to each other as a form of
entertainment. With James Russel Lowell in the group there were three other
very important and impactful for this movement. Such as Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow, John Greanleaf Whittier and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Usually in
these poets you can see the retelling of legends and historical events and
putting it into a poem with a very di erent philosophical meaning under it.
For example you will notice a tendency of starting the poem with "Listen, my
children, and you shall hear"( H.W. Longfellow "Paul Revere's Ride"). These
writers were well known in their time, even though their literary style was not
unique. Seeing the common man as a hero was also part of this
deEuropeanization movement. If we take a look at European literature of the
same period the hero for Europe was established as quite a sophisticated and
educated and sometimes if not most times does not have a solid moral code
but just a "have to" way of behavior dictated by the society of those years.
The Americans turn away from that stereotype. Instead James Fenimore
Cooper the writer of the irst American novel choses a main character and
names him Natty Bumppo, not quite the best and most heroic name for a
main character however Natty has a few very important and quite unusual
character traits such as innocence, youth and due to that awkwardness
around people. He is a very intuitive and nature-loving fellow with a solid
moral code helping him quest for the higher truth. Characters such as
Indiana Jones and Luke Skywalker were taken from this speci ic archetype of

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 a character. They do not have a long changing character arch even though
from the moment of introduction we always know their moral compass is
always pointing to the right direction.
Romantics were greatly appreciated during their lifetimes and afterwards
greatly followed by many of the American poets and writers. Henry David
Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville were liberated by
what the romantics put into their writing philosophically and spiritually. Later
in their careers they would look back and see the impact and even mention
it. Emily Dickinson for example would one day see a ly and write about the
other side of death. Herman Melville took one whaling voyage and turned it
into an allegory and criticism of the American imperialism and de iance of
nature. Even in the 20th century the American critic Harold Bloom looked
back at what Emerson said and wrote "The Strong Tradition of American
Poets". From Robert frost to John Ashbury the legacy of the American
romantic period is detectable in all the works of the great poets and writers
of America.
Realism in American Literature stepped forward during this period as well.
Writers such as Mark Twain, being a quite popular igure of the realism
movement because and these are not my words they were taken out of a
book written in 2007 called "Norton Anthology For American Literature"
Twain's style in luenced by journalism, was wedded to the vernacular direct
and unadorned but was also highly evocative and irreverently humorous
helped change the way Americans weite their language. His characters speak
like real people and sound distinctively American using local dialects and
newly invented (for the time) words, and regional accents."
The characteristics for this movement were:
1. Objectivity
2. Fidelity to facts
A popilar literary device used in this kind of literature was the so called
"frame narrative". A story within a story. The French called it "mise en abime"
This as a matter of fact however despite not being anything new (such works
had been written previously for example in "Canterbury Tales" by G. Chaucer)
were very powerful and resonated quite deeply with the people since they
were done in a new manner. The usage of AAVE and slang in general igured
a lot in these works.

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 Some of the most famous realists will include W. Sydney Porter (O. Henry)
George W. Cable and Henry C. Bunner.
The 20th century on the other hand was a great time for American
modernism. The start of this movement was 1914. The early 20th century saw
the birth of a new and improved "American Literary Modernism" movement.
The modernist literary movement was driven by a conscious desire to
overturn traditional ways of representing and tried to express as much as
possible the new sensibilities of their time. Their way to show things were
quite original. They would take something that had happened and turn it into
something grotesque to a point of it being non recognizable however familiar
and understandable. Originating from Europe and mainly North America. It is
usually characterized by a self conscious traditional style of poetry, verse,
and prose. Modernists, most famous for their individually di erent and
experimental way of writing and self expressing were adhering to Ezra
Pound's rule of "Make it New". The modernist movement was a necessity due
to traumatic experiences these young people were exposed to as a result of
the First World War. The horrors of that war made people prevail
assumptions about society reassessed. Thinkers such as Freud for example
started questioning the rationality of mankind itself and at the end, as most
thinkers do, brought another even worse war upon mankind. Due to this the
general public including the Modernist writers of the era started questioning
and developing mistrust for institutions of power such as the government
and even religion itself, driving people to reject and question things that were
previously considered absolute truths. In 1922 T.S. Eliot, one of my favorite
poets of the decade wrote an exceptionally self-aware, introspective called
The Waste Land. This piece actively explores the darker aspects of human
nature in a very unique and beautiful way almost honoring it. The early 1910s
and 20s were the peak of modernist ideals to the point were they dominated
not only literature but also art and even music. The movement would go on
gaining never seen before popularity when American writers such as Ernest
Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and William Faulkner
began writing to their full potential and at some point let go of the strict new
morale and added their own views and groundbreaking ideas.Late
modernism often used referring to works written between 1930 and 1950.
These writers such as William Faulkner, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos
Williams, Ralph Ellison received a lot of literary acclaim and praise and were

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 highly appreciated during this period. Early modernist writers such as Ezra
Pound started to show the laws of the so-called "rational word" and
destroyed the image of "reliable critics" which we can still observe today. We
still see the mistrust for these mainstream critics to this day. They also
destroyed the idea that artists are the representatives of the elite bourgeois
culture and ideas. Once again the common folk was in the center of
America's attention however this time the writers were the common folk and
not their characters. Artists broke the "normal" and created a new
understanding of this word. A more honest and explicit type of writing and
expression was now the new normal. We will see this exact thing happen
again when speaking of the Beats generation later. A new term, the so called
"stream of consciousness" was now being used to describe the modernists'
attempts at recreating the stream of natural low of the character's thoughts.
This inevitably created a non linear literary structure which would force the
reader to get more invested in the actual feelings and thought process of the
characters. When we think of this speci ic phenomenon the irst writer
coming to mind is James Joyce an Irishman who perfected this in his epic
novel Ulysses, but in the American literary community William Faulkner,
Katherine A. Porter and John Dos Passos worked on the development of the
style as well, renewing and improving it along the way. In 1912 Ezra Pound
founded the Imagist movement which gave Modernism it's early start in the
20th century, However the idealism movement resulted in the outbreak of
world war 1 and writers started creating more cynical works and characters
which would prevail a sense of disillusionment. They would right quite short
and to the point. Dealing with the horrors of the war and not seeing any of its
e ects on the USA like they could in Europe a lot of these great writers
moved to various places in Europe and mostly to France calling themselves
"the Lost Generation." In his kind of autobiographical story "" Earnest
Hemingway con irmed the term was coined by Gertrude Stein who was an
art collector and writer herself. This age was also a time period that saw the
birth of voices to authors, poets and artists who were previously denied this
opportunity. And this was called "the Harlem Renaissance". Writers of color
such as Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, Nella Larson and
Zora Neale Hurston became very well known, a previously unseen and truly
grand event. Members of the Harlem Renaissance would open doors for
many other African American authors that would follow.

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 "If you do not even understand what words say, how can you expect to pass
judgement on what words conceal?"
- H.D.

Postmodernist periods which started in the late 20th century (1940's)

everywhere were quite bleak and did not give much hope for the future
especially rising from the urge to rebel agains Modernism itself, of literature
in general except not in the US (Russia was giving hope for better days as
well). All of this happened due to the fact that American Modernists made
promises to enable and o ered control to the people. However obviously did
not ful ill any of their claims instead ending up in totalitarianism and another
global war with atomic potential. Postmodernists were quite an interesting
conceptual group since they were uni ied by nothing except for the 3 main
characteristics:
1.Rejecion of Modernism
2. Multifarious approach
Originally postmodernism was born due to the lack of artistic, intellectual,
cultural thought or organized principles. You can see such contradictory
ideas like "Modernists would focus on the writer, we will focus on the reader."
If Modernists were egar and excited for the future of progress and
industrialization, postmodern writers would take that and write about all the
negativity and degradation these kinds of improvements would bring to the
future. Due to this Writers such as Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Rita Dove and
John Ashbery would come up. They tried to re-conceptualize the society and
history. There were quite a few movements that in luenced postmodernism
but the main 2 were Pragmatism and Existentialism. However they brought
upon themselves the one generation you can only hear about for 3 minutes
or read about in autobiographical works, and lately my favorite movement of
all The Beats Generation. I would really like to speak about this literary
movement since it is not much spoken about. In the 1950s a quite prominent
movement called "The beats Generation" with a term coined by a queer
student at the University of Columbia by the name of Allan Ginsberg who
would go on to become alongside his friend Jack Kerouac one of the most
famous and groundbreaking writers of all time. They made quite a statement
right after the publication of "Naked Lunch" an autobiographical book by

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 William S. Burroughs about the accidental and tragic death of his wife after
he shot her in the head with a pistol trying to aim at the glass of whiskey on
her head. The movement was more about the life and characters which each
of the writers experienced rather than the perfectly placed syntax. In the 50's
sometimes called the "Golden age of Television" the youth was quite
rebellious due to newly acquired access to previously unseen freedom and
information. Elvis, Chuck Berry, Andy Warhol, capitalism was truly at it's peak
with the worrying communism on the other side of the world. The beats
generation had 3 main igures who made the movement what it was. These
three were Allan Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac. These
three would take a journey of "self liberation" never previously seen before.
Taking and so often experimenting with psychedelic drugs, sexual liberation
and going on spiritual quests these three would help bring liberal publishing
to the United States since the contents of their works would push boundaries
no one ever even attempted to push before. Words and works that were
previously considered vulgar and taboo, ungodly and immoral would all be
present on the pages of these writers. Please keep in mind this was not
during but before the Hippie movement was ever a thing. Something they
would come to realize was something was missing and that something was
life and spirit. Militarism, materialism and sexual oppression were all topics
greatly discussed and immensely criticised by the Beats. A symbol of this and
the hippie movement was and still is one of the greatest poems of all
American Literature "Howl" where Ginsberg thoroughly cliticises capitalism
and conformity in the USA. The poem stroke all readers since it would
contain homosexual relations, heterosexual tales and contained obscenity
which at the time were all of course forbidden. Their writing was considered
unpublishable and was heavily criticised. Protesting was a major aspect of
the Beats generation. William S. Burroughs is also worth a major paragraph
however his writing was never merely as easy to speak about as Ginsberg's or
Kerouac's. "Naked Lunch" was the irst crime based vignette (a short story
which can be read in any order as there is no linear plot to each chapter) that
broke the way America wrote and created what Americans would ever write
in the future. One of the greatest people he in luenced was David Bowie
himself as he would go on and write songs the same way Burroughs would
write books: using the "Cut up" technique (take a sentence, cut it up, make a
new one). A new mythology for the space age was being created.

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 SOURCES:
Enciclopedia Britannica

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