Key Themes in

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Key Themes in

• American Literature

Prepared by Mr. Kevin Cheng
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Outline of Key Themes

1. The Colonial Period Beginnings to 1790
2. The New Republic 1790-1820
3. American Romanticism 1820-1865
4. The Continental Nation 1865-1900
5. The Progressive Era 1900-1920
6. American Lit as part of the mainstream of Western
   Lit 1920-1945
7. Cultural Diversity in American Literature
   1945-present

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The Colonial Period Beginnings to 1790

• The English came to settle the land.
• For first 100 years, early settlers were confined
  to the sea coast from Maine to Florida. The
  westward movement was not till the late 18th
  century.
• In New England, a public education system was
  developed which gave rise to the development of
  literary arts.
• Their culture helped shape the nation.

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The Colonial Period Beginnings to 1790

• Puritanism
• John Smith (1580-1631)
• Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672)
• Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758)
• Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

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American Romanticism 1820-1865

• American literary Romanticism derives mainly from
• the English Romantic Poets (Coleridge
  Wordsworth),
• German Romantic Philosophy and
• Jonathan Edwards (A Divine and Supernatural Light
  Images and Shadows of Divine Things)

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American Romanticism 1820-1865

• Five principal Romantic themes
• intuition (truth of the heart) is more
  trustworthy than reason
• to express deeply felt experience is more
  valuable than to elaborate universal principles
• the individual is at the centre of life and God
  is at the centre of the individual
• nature is an array of physical symbols from which
  knowledge of the supernatural can be intuited
• we should aspire to the Ideal, to changing whaat
  is to what ought to be.

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American Romanticism 1820-1865

• James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851)
• Transcendentalism (emerging around 1815)
• Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82)
• Margaret Fuller (1810-1850)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
• Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
• Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
• Herman Melville (1819-1891)
• Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

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American Lit as part of the mainstream of Western
Lit 1920-1945

• After WW1, military, political and business
  forces created a reactionary climate hostile to
  new social and artistic ideas.
• Many young writers left for Europe.
• They found the freedom to critically scrutinise
  the values of their own country
• Discovered new standards of craftsmanship and
  new techniques originated by an older generation
  of artists and thinkers.

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American Lit as part of the mainstream of Western
Lit 1920-1945

• Poetry French symboliste poets, Yeats and Pound
• Novelists Proust, Joyce and Gertrude Stein
• Visual Arts cubism, post-impressionism,
  dada-ism
• Concepts Freud and Einstein
• Even if their refinement was European, their
  subject matter was American presented in
  American terms without timidity.

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American Lit as part of the mainstream of Western
Lit 1920-1945

• Modernism
• Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)
• Ezra Pound (1885-1972) and the New Poetry
• T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
• E. E. Cummings (1894-1962)
• F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
• Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
• Langston Hughes (1902-1976)
• John Steinbeck (1902-1968)

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Cultural Diversity in American Literature
1945-present

• In the early 40s, criticism placed a new emphasis
  on the purely literary aspects of writing
  insisted that the artist work outside of
  political and social consideration.
• This position became controversial in the 60s,
  and from the 70s till present, has been the
  object of increasingly vigorous attack.
• Many divergent forms of criticism took to the
  fore in the American literary consciousness.

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Cultural Diversity in American Literature
1945-present

• Tennessee Williams (1911-1983)
• Arthur Miller (1915-)
• James Baldwin (1924-1987)
• Alice Walker (1944-)
• Beat Poets Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder
• Anne Sexton (1928-1975)
• Adrienne Rich (1929-)
• Toni Morrison (1931-)
• Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)
• Maxine Hong Kingston (1940-)
• Amy Tan (1952-)

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Hmm

• What constitutes the main themes and features
  (i.e. the spirit) of American Lit?
• Is this spirit the same in the past as in
  contemporary America?
• What is a text that is adequately representative
  of the spirit of American Lit?
• What mode/genre is representative of American
  Lit?
• How does The Crucible measure up as a
  representative text?

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Interesting Links

• American Literature on the Web http//www.nagasaki
  -gaigo.ac.jp/ishikawa/amlit/
• Americas Library http//www.americaslibrary.gov/c
  gi-bin/page.cgi
• Outline of American Literature http//usinfo.state
  .gov/products/pubs/oal/oaltoc.htm
• PAL Perspectives in American Literature
  http//www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/TABLE.HT
  ML
• The Cambridge History of English and American
  Literature
• http//www.bartleby.com/cambridge/
• The Norton Anthology of American Literature
• http//www.wwnorton.com/naal/