Overview of American Literature

Written by: Doaa Alaa Hashem

MA Student

Supervised by: Dr. Sara Rashwan

Faculty of Arts - English Department

Ain Shams University

Overview of American Literature

Colonial/ Puritan Period (1620-1750)

Social background:

The first permanent English settlement in North America was established at

Jamestown, Virginia in 1617.

Newly arrived colonists create villages and towns and establish new

governments while protesting the old ways in Europe

Did not consider themselves “Americans” until mid-18C

Enormous displacement of Native-American civilizations

o French—St Lawrence River

o Swedes—Delaware River

o Dutch—Hudson River

o German and Scots-Irish—New York and Pennsylvania

o Spanish—Florida

o Africans (mostly slaves) were throughout the colonies

Literature:

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Literature of the period dominated by the Puritans and their religious influence.

Puritans emphasized hard work, piety and sobriety; The earliest writings include

diaries, traveling books, journals, letters, sermons even government contracts.

o emphasis is on faith in one’s daily life

a person’s fate is determined by God

all are corrupt and need a Savior

o theocracy- civil authority in Bible and church

o nature is revelation of God’s providence and power

o Puritan work ethic—belief in hard work and simple, no-frills living

Writing is utilitarian; writers are amateurs (not professional writers)

Writing is instructive—sermons, diaries, personal narratives,

Puritan Plain Style– simple, direct

Representative authors:

o Wiliam Bradford (journal),

o Anne Bradstreet (poetry),

o Jonathan Edwards (sermon),

o Mary Rowlandson (captivity narrative),

o Phillis Wheatley (poetry),

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o Olaudah Equiano (slave narrative)

Age of Reason or Revolutionary Period (1750-1815)

Social background:

The War for Independence lasted for eight years (1776 - 1783)

Literature:

Writers focused on explaining and justifying the American Revolution

After the Revolution, this period becomes known as Early Nationalism.

Writers begin to ponder what it really means to be an American.

After the War of 1812, which removed the last British troops from North

America, there was an even greater focus on nationalism, patriotism, and

American identity

Emphasis on reason as opposed to faith alone; rise of empirical science,

philosophy, theology

Shift to a more print-based culture; literacy seen as sign of status

Instructive in values, highly ornate writing style; highly political and patriotic

Representative authors:

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o The earliest writer Benjamin Franklin and “Poor Richard’s Almanac”

and “Autobiography” which is the recording of his rising from a state of

poverty and obscurity to wealth and fame. Mottos in “Poor Richard’s

Almanac”:

Lost time is never found again.

A penny saved is a penny earned.

Fish and visitors stink in three days.

Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and

wise.

o Other important figures Thomas Paine: “Common Sense” and

“American Crisis” (pamphlets),

o Thomas Jefferson: “The Declaration of Independence” (political

documents),

o Philip Freneau and his poems,

o Patrick Henry and his speech,

o Abigail Adams (letters)

Romantic Period (1820 – 1865)

Social background:

Industrial Revolution; Revolution in transportation, science,

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Industrial revolution made “old ways” of doing things irrelevant

western expansion;

immigrant’s contribution;

political ideal of equality and democracy;

the influence of European Romanticists

Optimistic period of invention, Manifest Destiny, abolition movement

Literature:

American Romanticism is a philosophical reaction to the previous decades in

which reason and rational thought dominated:

o the “birth” of truly American literature;

o the first American Renaissance;

o emphasis on universal human experience

o emphasis upon the imaginative and emotional qualities of literature;

imagination prized over reason; intuition over fact

o a liking for the picturesque, the exotic, the sensuous, the sensational,

fantasy and the supernatural;

Growth of urban population in the Northeast with growth of newspapers,

lectures, debates (especially over slavery and women’s roles)

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Writers celebrated individualism with a strong tendency to exalt the individual

common man, imagination, creativity, and emotions.

o Writing can usually be interpreted two ways—surface and in depth

o Writing is didactic—attempting to shape readers

o Good will triumph over evil.

o Strong focus on inner feelings

Blossoming of short stories, novels, and poetry

Early Romantic authors began the tradition of creating imaginative literature

that was distinctly American such as William Cullen Bryant (poetry)

Fireside Poets, the most popular Romantic poets of the time, were read in the

home by the fireside because their poetry contained strong family values,

patriotism, etc. It has remained popular in elementary schools for memorization.

o Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

o Oliver Wendell Holmes

o James Russell Lowell

o John Greenleaf Whittier

Transcendentalism came to America from Europe

It represented romanticism on the Puritan soil; emphasis on spirit, or the Over-

soul; “a transparent eyeball;”

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the stress of the importance of the individual as the most important element of

society;

a fresh perception of nature as symbolic of the spirit or God;

belief that man’s nature is inherently good; “divine spark” or “inner-light”

belief that man and society are perfectible (utopia)

stress individualism, self-reliance, intuition

o Ralph Waldo Emerson the chief spokesman of Transcendentalism;

Nature regarded as the Bible of New England Transcendentalism; “The

American Scholar” regarded as America’s Declaration of Intellectual

Independence.

o Henry David Thoreau; representative of Transcendentalism; Walden, a

faithful record of his reflections when he was in solitary communication

with nature.

o Washington Irving father of American short stories; the first who won

international fame; representative works The Sketch Book and two

important humorous short stories

Dark Romanticism (also known as Gothic or Anti-Transcendentalism)

Belief that man’s nature is inherently evil

Belief that whatever is wrong with society—sin, pain, evil—has to be fixed by

fixing the individual man first.

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Use of supernatural

Strong use of symbolism

Dark landscapes, depressed characters

o “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”

o James Fenimore Cooper; father of American fiction; Leather Stocking

Tales, a series of five novels about the frontier life of American settlers

o Edgar Allan Poe; father of American detective stories; “The Murders in

the Rue Morgue”; a great writer of fiction, a poet of the first rank, and a

critic of acumen and insight; important short stories “The Fall of the

House of Usher,” “Ligeia”

o Hawthorne; his black vision of life and human being; evil as the trade

mark of human being; his novels: The Scarlet Letter, The House of the

Seven Gables; short story like “Young Goodman Brown”

o Melville; best known as the author of one book, MobyDick, an

encyclopedia of everything, history, philosophy, religion, etc.; a

Shakespearean tragedy of man fighting against overwhelming odds in an

indifferent and even hostile universe

Transitional writers which span the Romantic and Realistic Periods express

transcendental ideas in poetry with realistic detail though their focus was still

romantic. They experimented with new poetic techniques such as free verse and

slant rhyme.

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o Walt Whitman; pioneer poet; free verse poetry basing on the irregular

rhythmic cadence, no conventional use of meter, rhyme may or may not

be present; Leaves of Grass, “Song of Myself” “When Lilacs last in the

Dooryard Bloom’d”

o Emily Dickinson; very unique poet; the largest portion of her poetry

concerns death and immortality “I heard a fly buzz when I died,” “My

life closed twice before its Close”; no titles, always quoted by their first

lines; dashes are used as a musical device to create cadence and capital

letters as a means of emphasis; a single image; noted for laconic brevity,

directness and plainness.

Realism and Naturalism (1850-1900)

Social Background

One of the most turbulent in American history, which includes the Civil War,

significant industrial inventions, and extensive westward expansion

Literature:

Realism was a rejection of Romantic view of life as too idealistic; it was a

reaction against Romanticism or a move away from the bias towards romance

and self-creating fictions; a great interest in the realities of life, everyday

existence, what was brutal or sordid and class struggle; Three dominant figures,

William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and Henry James.

o Henry James; psychological approach to his subject matter; concerned

more with the inner life of human beings than with overt human actions;

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the forerunner of the 20th century “stream of consciousness” novels and

the founder of psychological realism; international theme or American

innocence in face of European sophistication; representative works: The

Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassador, The Wings of the Dove, The

Golden Bowl; point of view

o Howell was influenced by Henry James. His main focus was on the

rising middle class and the way they lived. In his public writing and in

his novels, he drew attention to pressing social issues of the time. He

published his first novel, Their Wedding Journey, in 1872, but his

literary reputation soared with the realist novel A Modern Instance,

published in 1882, which described the decay of a marriage. His 1885

novel The Rise of Silas Lapham became his best known, describing the

rise and fall of an American entrepreneur of the paint business. His social

views were also strongly represented in the novels Annie

Kilburn (1888), A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), and An Imperative

Duty (1891).

Writers seek “verisimilitude” by portraying “a slice of life” as it really is

Usually objective narrator

Realistic authors made it their mission to convey the reality of life, however

harsh. Characters reflect ordinary people in everyday life, determined yet

flawed, struggling to overcome the difficulties of war, family, natural disasters,

and human weaknesses.

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While good will always triumph over evil, it may not happen in every case in

this lifetime

Nature is a powerful force beyond man’s control.

Racism persisted beyond slavery—Reconstruction, Jim Crow, KKK, etc.

Local Colorism; Local color writers (also known as Regionalists) focused on

a particular region of the country, seeking to represent accurately the culture and

beliefs of that area.

Considered the true beginning of Realism; the presentation and interpretation of

the local character, the truthful color of local life.

Emphasized accurate portrayals of the physical landscape as well as the habits,

occupations, and speech (dialect) of the area’s people

o Mark Twain, the true father of American literature by pen name of

Samuel Langhorne Clemens; rough humor and social satire; magic

power with language, the use of vernacular and colloquial speech;

representative works: Adventure of Huckleberry Finn, Life on the

Mississippi, The Adventure of Tom Sawyer

o Bret Harte (the West, particularly the mining camps of California)

o Kate Chopin (the South, particularly Louisiana)

o Willa Cather (the Midwest, particularly Nebraska)

o Mary Wilkins Freeman (the New England area)

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Civil War writers are primarily concerned with the war, slavery, and to a lesser

extent, women’s suffrage.

o Abraham Lincoln

o Robert E. Lee

o Mary Chesnut

o Sojourner Truth

o Harriet Beecher Stowe

o John Parker

o Frederick Douglass

Mainline realistic authors include several well-known poets

o Paul Laurence Dunbar

o Edgar Lee Masters

Realism took a cynical turn to Naturalism when literary writers were exposed

to the views of three authors whose scientific or political works appeared near

the end of the century.

o Charles Darwin—biological determinism

o Sigmund Freud—psychological determinism

o Karl Marx—socio-economic determinism

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Emile Zola started this movement in France but it soon spread through Europe,

England and America. They focused on materialism and lack of values due to

the clash between profit and traditions. They also believed that humans are

governed by four elements:

o Passion: related to human desires and reactions, such as hatred, love,

anger, revenge, etc… These may be controlled to a certain extent.

o Instincts: spontaneous, at the spur of the moment, so they can't be

controlled like fear, survival, etc ...

o Environment: either social or private and both affect the personality of

humans

o Heredity: a natural element which can never be changed.

These are the core of naturalism and all the characters in naturalists' works are

affected by these fir elements.

The naturalists chose their subjects from the lower ranks of the society,

portrayed misery and poverty of the underdogs who were demonstrably victims

of society and nature. And one of the most familiar themes in American

Naturalism is the theme of human bestiality, especially as an explanation of

sexual desire.

They focused on grim reality, observed characters much as scientists might

observe laboratory animals, and sought to discover the natural laws which

govern human lives.

Naturalists viewed nature and the universe as indifferent, even hostile, to man.

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The universe of the naturalists is godless, cold, and indifferent.

Life often seems meaningless.

Fate = chance (no free will)

The characters in these works are often helpless victims—trapped by nature, the

environment, or their own heritage.

o Jack London (novels, short stories): The Call of the Wild; Martin Eden

o Stephen Crane (novels, short stories, poetry): Red Badge of Courage;

Maggie, A Girl of the Street

o Edwin Arlington Robinson (poetry)

o Ambrose Bierce (short stories)

o Frank Norris; McTeague

o Theodore Dreiser; Sister Carrie; An American Tragedy

Modernism (1900-1950)

Social background:

Booming industry and material prosperity in contrast with a sense of unease and

restlessness underneath; a decline in moral standard described as a spiritual

poverty; the impact of war feelings of fear, loss, disorientation and

disillusionment

Modern Period writers were affected by

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o World War I, World War II, fear of communism, and the beginning of

the Cold War

o Roaring 20’s, the Great Depression, commercialism

o increased population

o lingering racial tensions after slavery and Reconstruction

o technological changes

o rise of the youth culture

o fear over eroding traditions

Literature:

Imagist Movement; Modernism in poetry; the Lost Generation; Depression

period; the Beat Movement; American fiction after WWII; New fiction;

Twentieth century American Drama

Modern writers are known for

o themes of alienation and disconnectedness

o frequent use of irony and understatement

o experimentation with new literary techniques in fiction and poetry:

stream of consciousness

interior dialogue

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fragments

o trying to create a unique style

o rise of ethnic and women writers

The Lost Generation writers were a group of Americans who chose to live in

Paris after WWI.

It was a period of spiritual crisis; the second American Renaissance; the

expatriate movement; young people volunteered to “take part in the war to end

wars”, only to find that modern warfare was not glorious or heroic; the feeling of

gloom and despair and cutoff; the sense of doom, dislocation and fragmentation;

the term named by Gertrude Stein; Hemingway as the most representative

Their writing explored themes of alienation and change and confronted people’s

fears, despair, and disillusionment.

o T. S. Eliot (poetry)

o Ernest Hemingway awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1954 for his

“powerful Style-forming mastery of the art;”

Hemingway Code heroes: Man can be physically destroyed but

never defeated spiritually; “grace under pressure;” Hemingway

iceberg analogy: "The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due

to only 1/8 of it being above water."

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“Less is more” his language or diction seemingly simple and

natural, actually polished and tightly controlled, highly

suggestive and connotative

The Sun Also Rises; the impact of war on a whole generation

A Farewell to Arms; man is doomed to be entrapped

For Whom the Bell Tolls; a volunteer American fighting in the

Spanish Civil War

The Old Man and the Sea; a representation of life as a struggle

against unconquerable natural forces

o Fitzgerald mirror of the exciting age in almost every way; literary

spokesman of the Jazz Age; The Great Gatsby; the Jazz Age of the 1920s

characterized by frivolity and carelessness

o Faulkner; his creation of a mythical kingdom that mirrors not only the

decline of the southern society but also the spiritual wasteland of the

whole American society; the use of stream of consciousness to

emphasize the reactions and inner musings of the narrator; the use of

multiple points of view giving the story a circular form; the use of

montage, to fragment the chronological time by juxtaposing the past with

the present; representative works: The Sound and the Fury; Light in

August; Absalom, Absalom!; Go Down, Moses; “A Rose for Emily”

o Sherwood Anderson exploring the motivations and frustrations in terms

of Freud’s theory of psychology, especially in Winesburg, Ohio

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o Sinclair Lewis; a sociological writer, Babbit as the presentation of a

documentary picture of the narrow and limited middleclass mind

Traditional poets in the Modern Period include such writers as Robert Frost

Imagist Movement: Imagists were a subgroup of the Lost Generation that

created a new kind of poetry. Their poetry, which highly resembles Japanese

haiku, concentrates on creating a word picture, a snapshot of a moment in time

Pound and Flint laid down three main principles: direct treatment of poetic

subjects, elimination of merely ornamental or superfluous words, and rhythmical

composition in the sequence of the musical phrase rather than in the sequence of

a metronome. Pound and “In a Station of the Metro;” Sandburg and “The Fog;”

William Carlos Williams and “The Red Wheelbarrow.”

Imagists conveyed through poetry; the feeling of frustration and failure; the

commercialization and debasement of art in Pound’s “Mauberley”; Pound’s

attempt to impose, through art, order and meaning upon a chaotic and

meaningless world in “Cantos;” T. S. Eliot revealed the spiritual crisis of

postwar Europe in his epochal epic "The Waste Land"; a trivial world of total

emptiness and the split nature of modern man in “Love Song of J. Alfred

Prufrock;”; E. E. cummings disregarded grammar and punctuation, always used

"i’ instead of “I” as a protest against self importance; Wallace Stevens focused

his attention on man and things in his world; Robert Frost can hardly be

classified with the old or the new

The Depression period; the Great Depression (1929 - 1933); novels of social

protest; John Steinbeck, a representative of the 1930s, his The Grapes of Wrath,

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a symbolic journey of man on the way to find some truth about life and himself,

and a record of the dispossessed and the wretched farmers during the Great

Depression

Postmodernism or Contemporary Period (1950-present)

Social background:

unprecedented prosperity

global conflict-- the end of the Cold War, the Korean war, the Vietnam war, the

rise of terrorism, Gulf War, 9/11, Iraqi War. War in Afganistan

social protest—the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement, the

gay rights movement

mass culture and consumerism; media saturation

rise of technology and space exploration

the digital revolution

Literature

The best adjective for this literary period is eclectic—a collection of a little bit of

everything.

Postmodernists create traditional works without traditional structure or narrative.

The writings have increasingly addressed social issues related to gender and race

and youthful rebellion.

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Questioning of “traditional values”—insistence that values are not permanent

but only “local” or “historical”; media culture interprets values

The writings are often critical and ironic, concentrating on surface realities and

the absurdity of daily life.

There are no heroes; anti-heroes are common

Often detached, unemotional

Individuals often seem isolated.

The Quest For Identity

o In the contemporary period, there is a marked shift from stories that

showed realistic events and situations to portraying the inner experiences

and sometimes irrational psychology of human beings. Contemporary

literature main qualities are the quest for identity and Expressionism

with key literary devices that are often used: the use of rhythm and

juxtaposition.

o In most American contemporary literature, the main characters are on

a quest for identity. They are searching for who they are and struggling

to find their place in the modern world. This quest to find one's self is

often a lonely one, where the main character feels out of place, isolated,

or misunderstood in society.

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In African American Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man, for

example, the main character considers himself invisible because

people constantly view him through a lens of racial prejudice.

Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman shows the trials of Willy

Loman, as he feels lost and left behind in a seemingly never-

ending quest to buy more.

The most classic example of a hero on a quest to find himself is

Holden Caulfield from African American writer J.D.

Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. He is isolated from mainstream

culture and feels misunderstood by most people. He can be

compared to other rebellious social outcasts like James Dean,

Donnie Darko, or Max Fisher from Rushmore. Holden Caulfield

isn't interested in growing up and getting a good job, playing golf,

or climbing any social ladders, and he's sick of what he calls the

'bastards' and 'phonies' who are into that kind of stuff. He even

feels alone around his peers most of the time.

Take for example, his line about smoking: At the end of the first

act we went out with all the other jerks for a cigarette. What a

deal that was. You never saw so many phonies in all your life,

everybody smoking their ears off and talking about the play so

that everybody could hear and know how sharp they were. As

you can tell, pretty much everyone and their mother is a 'phony

jerk' for Holden. His alienation from society is clear, as he can be

super crude and socially inappropriate, constantly flirting with

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older women, drinking alcohol underage, and swearing. But what

really stands out with Holden Caulfield is the honesty in his voice

as he talks openly about his internal struggle to find his place in

what he sees as a world of jerks.

Expressionism

o Making personal psychological experience visible to the reader is

another major element of contemporary literature, a trend known in

literary circles as Expressionism. The idea here is to bring internal

feelings and experiences to the surface, and a character's inner life is just

as important, if not more important, than the external events taking place.

Expressionism is the attempt to show the character's inner struggles, and

writers in the contemporary period will illustrate the character's state of

mind as often as possible.

o For example, Holden Caulfield comments, When I really worry about

something, I don't just fool around. I even have to go to the bathroom

when I worry about something. Only, I don't go. I'm too worried to go. I

don't want to interrupt my worrying to go. Here we see Holden's

thoughts come to the surface, and as he works to find himself, he takes

us on this journey exploring his inner thoughts. So you can see how if

characters are on a quest for identity, Expressionism is a crucial element

for this literature, as it allows authors to take unseen inner experiences

and make them visible.

Elements of Style: Use of Rhythm and Tone

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o This expression of emotional experience can take place not only in what

is said but also in the rhythm that flows from the words being said. You

might think about it like music. When you listen to a song, you can get

an idea of the emotional state of the artist just by listening to the rhythm

and tone - not even knowing what the words mean.

o You can hear the use of rhythm and tone in the Latino American Sandra

Cisneros' House on Mango Street. Here, the main character Esperanza

comments, All brown all around, we are safe. But watch us drive into a

neighborhood of another color and our knees go shakity-shake and our

car windows get rolled up tight and our eyes look straight. The sound of

the words 'All brown all around' creates a calming rhythm as the vowel

sounds resonate off each other and flow slowly. We can hear the sounds

change with the words 'knees go shakity-shake ... and our eyes look

straight. As the words become clipped and repeat the sound of the sharp

consonants, the rhythm and tone shifts, and this helps communicate the

discomfort Esperanza feels while driving in a different neighborhood.

Juxtaposition

o As we have seen in the contemporary period, there is a definite shift

from accurately portraying events in the physical world to accurately

portraying the inner reality of humans. The goal of showing internal,

psychological reality actually pushes aside the need to accurately show

events, and writers can get super creative when it comes to how they

show the inner workings of the human mind. In order to show the

complexity of human experience, writers will blend and mix up events

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out of order, juxtaposing images from different times or spaces together,

in order to create a sense or feeling. The term juxtaposition means

placing images that normally aren't seen together, together, and the clash

between these images highlights their differences.

o You will see writers like Tennessee Williams and Ralph Ellison using

juxtaposition and messing with the laws of physics by blending the past

with the present. But the most classic example of juxtaposition is Arthur

Miller's Death of a Salesman. In this play, the main character, Willy

Loman, is often confronted with people and sounds from his past in his

day-to-day life. For example, Willy will be having a regular conversation

with his wife Linda about his day at work, and then randomly you'll hear

the sound of a woman laughing and talking to Willy - a woman, it turns

out, with whom he previously had an affair. This laughter can seem

really odd and out of place, and it will only make sense if you remember

this would never happen in reality, but it gives us a sense of how Willy is

feeling - in this case, guilty and embarrassed. In this scene, Willy's

discomfort and guilt is highlighted by putting the two images together,

and the tension in dealing with them at the same time is felt.

.American fiction after WWII; writings about traumatic war experience, The

Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer, Wind and War by Herman Wouk;

writings about Southern life following Faulkner’s footsteps, “A Good Man is

Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Conner; writings about Jewish experience (Saul

Bellow, Issac Singer); writings about black people (Ralph Ellison); writings

about the alienated youth, The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger; writings

about middleclass life (Updike)

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The Beat Movement; the impact of WWII, the cold war, the Korean war, the

Vietnam war, the assassination of Kennedy and of Martin Luther King ; the idea

of life as a big joke or an absurdity; the more disintegrating and fragmentary

world; more estranged and despondent people; all these factors affected a group

of American post-World War II writers who came to prominence in the 1950s,

as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired.

Central elements of "Beat" culture included rejection of received standards,

innovations in style, experimentation with drugs, alternative sexualities, an

interest in Eastern religion, a rejection of materialism, and explicit portrayals of

the human condition.

o Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" (1956), William S. Burroughs's "Naked

Lunch" (1959) and Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" (1957) are among the

best known examples of Beat literature. Both "Howl" and "Naked

Lunch" were the focus of obscenity trials that ultimately helped to

liberalize publishing in the United States. The members of the Beat

Generation developed a reputation as new-bohemian hedonists, who

celebrated non-conformity and spontaneous creativity.

o The Beat Poets (pre-hippies, highly intellectual, countered the hidden

despair of the 1950s with wildly exuberant language and behavior)—

Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg

New Fiction: American fiction in the 1960s and 1970s proves to be different;

writers like Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse Five), Joseph Heller (Catch22),

John Bath, etc. shared almost the same belief that human beings are trapped in a

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meaningless world and that neither God nor man can make sense of the human

condition

Twentieth century American Drama has gained itself an indispensable

position in the world of literature and also established its international reputation

for its achievements in the realistic theatre, expressionist theatre, meta-theatre

and feminist theater that are rooted in American social reality.

American realistic theatre features a genre of modern tragedy in the strand that

starts with Eugene O’Neill, continues with Tennessee Williams and

consummates with Arthur Miller, whose The Death of a Salesman depicts the

social reality of ordinary American people. The legacy is preserved in the later

generations of American playwright like Marsha Norman.

Expressionist theatre gained a firm foothold in U.S. since Eugene O’Neill

thematically uses expressionistic devices in his Hairy Ape and other plays.

Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller also use their expressionist dramaturgy

effectively in Glass Menagerie and The Death of a Salesman, respectively.

Meta-theatrical arts are intensively and effectively invented by American

playwright Thornton Wilder in his Our Town, an American classic that still

holds the stage for nearly eighty years.

American feminist theater remains active in United States since 1970s. Marsh

Norman’s ‘Night Mother is regarded as one of the most important plays written

by women playwrights who not only rival men playwrights with equally brilliant

dramatic art but also improve American theater with a special insights of women

playwrights.__

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Southern Renaissance writers follow in the footsteps of the earlier local color

writers in their focus on the South.

o Katherine Ann Porter

o William Faulkner

o Flannery O’Connor

Other representative authors:

o John Updike

o Truman Capote

o Stephen King

o Joyce Carol Oates

o J. D. Salinger

o James Thurber

o Confessional Poets (used anguish of their own lives to reveal hidden

despair)—Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell

Minority literature

o One of the key developments in late-20th-century American literature

was the rise to prominence of literature written by and about ethnic

minorities beyond African Americans and Jewish Americans, who had

already established their literary inheritances. This development came

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alongside the growth of the Civil Rights movements and its corollary, the

Ethnic Pride movement. This helped establish the new ethnic literature as

worthy objects of academic study, alongside such other new areas of

literary study as women's literature, gay and lesbian literature, working-

class literature, postcolonial literature, etc ...

o After being relegated to cookbooks and autobiographies for most of the

20th century, Asian American literature achieved widespread notice

through Maxine Hong Kingston's fictional memoir, The Woman

Warrior (1976), and her novels China Men (1980) and Tripmaster

Monkey: His Fake Book. 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.

o Indian-American author Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

for her debut collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies (1999),

and went on to write a well-received novel, The Namesake (2003), which

was shortly adapted to film in 2007. In her second collection of

stories, Unaccustomed Earth, released to widespread commercial and

critical success, Lahiri shifts focus and treats the experiences of

the second and third generation.

o Other notable Asian-American (but not immigrant) novelists

include Amy Tan, best known for her novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989),

tracing the lives of four immigrant families brought together by the game

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of Mahjong, and Korean American novelist Chang-Rae Lee, who has

published Native Speaker, A Gesture Life, and Aloft. Such poets

as Marilyn Chin and Li-Young Lee, Kimiko Hahn and Janice

Mirikitani have also achieved prominence, as has playwright David

Henry Hwang. Equally important has been the effort to recover earlier

Asian American authors, started by Frank Chin and his colleagues; this

effort has brought Sui Sin Far, Toshio Mori, Carlos Bulosan, John

Okada, Hisaye Yamamoto and others to prominence.

o Latina/o literature also became important during this period, starting with

acclaimed novels by Tomás Rivera (...y no se lo tragó la tierra)

and Rudolfo Anaya (Bless Me, Ultima), and the emergence of Chicano

theater with Luis Valdez and Teatro Campesino. Latina writing became

important thanks to authors such as Sandra Cisneros, an icon of an

emerging Chicano literature whose 1984 bildungsroman (German for

a "novel of formation/ education/ culture/ coming-of-age story". It is a literary

genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of

the protagonist from youth to adulthood, and in which, therefore, character

change is extremely important.) The House on Mango Street is taught in

schools across the United States, Denise Chavez's The Last of the Menu

Girls and Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New

Mestiza.

o Dominican-American author Junot Díaz, received the Pulitzer Prize for

Fiction for his 2007 novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,

which tells the story of an overweight Dominican boy growing up as

a social outcast in Paterson, New Jersey. Another Dominican

author, Julia Alvarez, is well known for How the García Girls Lost Their

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Accents and In the Time of the Butterflies. Cuban

American author Oscar Hijuelos won a Pulitzer for The Mambo Kings

Play Songs of Love, and Cristina García received acclaim for Dreaming

in Cuban. Well known Puerto Rican authors from this period include

novelist Nicholasa Mohr, playwright José Rivera, poet Judith Ortiz

Cofer, and the Nuyorican Poets Café.

o Spurred by the success of N. Scott Momaday's Pulitzer Prize

winning House Made of Dawn, Native American literature showed

explosive growth during this period, known as the Native American

Renaissance, through such novelists as Leslie Marmon

Silko (e.g., Ceremony), Gerald Vizenor (e.g., Bearheart: The Heirship

Chronicles and numerous essays on Native American literature), Louise

Erdrich (Love Medicine and several other novels that use a recurring set

of characters and locations in the manner of William Faulkner), James

Welch (e.g., Winter in the Blood), Sherman Alexie (e.g., The Lone

Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven), and poets Simon Ortiz and Joy

Harjo. The success of these authors has brought renewed attention to

earlier generations, including Zitkala-Sa, John Joseph Mathews, D'Arcy

McNickle and Mourning Dove.

o 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. Other

important authors include Etel Adnan and poet Naomi Shihab Nye.

Harlem Renaissance

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o Writers in the Harlem Renaissance represent a flourishing of African-

American authors in a cultural movement that also included music and

art

o These writers had two goals

to write about the African-American experience

to create a body of literature by African-American authors that

could rival anything written by anyone else

o Harlem Renaissance writers included, among others:

Langston Hughes (poetry)

Zora Neale Hurston (fiction)

Claude McKay (poetry)

Countee Cullen (poetry)

Arna Bontemps (poetry)

Helene Johnson (poetry)

James Weldon Johnson (poetry)

Jewish American literature

o Jewish American Literature holds an essential place in the literary

history of the United States. It encompasses traditions of writing

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in English, primarily, as well as in other languages, the most important of

which has been Yiddish. While critics and authors generally

acknowledge the notion of a distinctive corpus and practice of writing

about Jewishness in America, many writers resist being pigeonholed as

'Jewish voices'. Also, many nominally Jewish writers cannot be

considered representative of Jewish American literature, one example

being Isaac Asimov.

o Beginning with the memoirs and petitions composed by the Sephardic

immigrants who arrived in America during the mid 17th century, Jewish

American writing grew over the subsequent centuries to flourish in other

genres as well, including fiction, poetry, and drama.

o More recent authors like Nicole Krauss, Paul Auster, Michael

Chabon, Jonathan Safran Foer and Art Spiegelman use their works to

examine dilemmas of identity in their work, turning their attention

especially to the Holocaust and the trends of both ongoing

assimilation and cultural rediscovery exhibited by younger generations

of American Jews. Arguably the most influential of all American- Jewish

novels was Leon Uris' 'Exodus'. Its story of the struggle to create the

modern state of Israel translated into Russian became the inspiration for

hundreds of thousands of Russian immigrants to Israel. Modern Jewish

American novels often contain (a few or many) Jewish characters and

address issues and themes of importance to Jewish American society

such as assimilation, Zionism/Israel, and antisemitism, along with the

recent phenomenon known as "New antisemitism." Two Jewish-

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American writers have won the Nobel Prize, Isaac Bashevis Singer and

Saul Bellow. Magazines such as The New Yorker have proved to be

instrumental in exposing many Jewish American writers to a wider

reading public.

o Stereotypes of Jews in literature

Although Jewish stereotypes first appeared in works by non-

Jewish writers, after World War II it was often Jewish American

writers themselves who evoked such fixed images. The

prevalence of antisemitic stereotypes in the works of such authors

has sometimes been interpreted an expression of self-hatred;

however, Jewish American authors have also used these negative

stereotypes in order to refute them. However American- Jewish

literature has also strongly celebrated American life. It has been

primarily more an American than a Jewish literature. Perhaps the

preeminent example of this is the great breakthrough novel of

Saul Bellow 'Augie March'.

According to Sanford V. Sternlicht, the first generation of

Jewish-American authors presented "realistic portrayals - warts

and all" of Jewish immigrants. In contrast, some second or third-

generation Jewish-American authors deliberately "reinforced

negative stereotypes with satire and a selective realism".

o Main themes

Capitalism

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Assimilation

Antisemitism

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