2- ] American Literature

2- ] American Literature

AMERICAN LITERATURE

History of American Literature

Periods of American Literature

The history of American literature stretches across more than 400 years. It can be divided into five major periods, each of which has unique characteristics, notable authors, and representative works.

The Colonial and Early National Period (17th century to 1830)

The first 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 earliest days, during the 1600s, American literature consisted mostly of practical nonfiction 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. These histories, published in 1608 and 1624, are among the earliest works of American literature.

Nathaniel Ward and John Winthrop wrote books on religion, a topic of central concern in colonial America.

Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650) may be the earliest collection of poetry written in and about America, although it was published in England.

A new era began when the United States declared its independence in 1776, and much new writing addressed the country’s future. American poetry and fiction were largely modeled on what was being published overseas in Great Britain, and much of what American readers consumed also came from Great Britain.

The Federalist Papers (1787–88), by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, shaped the political direction of the United States.

Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, which he wrote during the 1770s and ’80s, told a quintessentially American life story.

Phillis Wheatley, an African woman enslaved in Boston, was the first Black poet of note in the United States. Her first book was Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). Philip Freneau was another notable poet of the era.

The first American novel, The Power of Sympathy by William Hill Brown, was published in 1789.

Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography, The Interesting Narrative (1789), was among the earliest slave narratives and a forceful argument for abolition.

By the first decades of the 19th century, a truly American literature began to emerge. Though still derived from British literary tradition, the short stories and novels published from 1800 through the 1820s began to depict American society and explore the American landscape in an unprecedented manner.

Washington Irving published the collection of short stories and essays The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. in 1819–20. It included “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” two of the earliest American short stories.

James Fenimore Cooper wrote novels of adventure about the frontiersman Natty Bumppo. These novels, called the Leatherstocking Tales (1823–41), depict his experiences in the American wilderness in both realistic and highly romanticized ways.

Puritan and Colonial Literature (1472-1775)

American literature began as the first English-speaking colonists settled along the eastern seaboard of the United States. The purpose of these early texts was usually to explain the process of colonization and describe the United States to future immigrants back home in Europe.

British explorer John Smith (1580-1631 — yes, the same one from Pocahontas!) is sometimes credited as the first American author for his publications that include A True Relation of Virginia (1608) and The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624). Like much literature from the colonial period, the format of these texts was non-fiction and utilitarian, focusing on the promotion of European colonization in America.

Revolutionary and Early National Literature (1775-1830)

During the American Revolution and the years of nation-building that followed, fiction writing was still uncommon in American literature. The fiction and poetry that was published remained heavily influenced by literary conventions established in Great Britain. In place of novels geared towards entertainment, writing was commonly used to further political agendas, namely the cause of independence.

Political essays emerged as one of the most important literary forms, and historical figures like Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), Samuel Adams (1722-1803), and Thomas Paine (1737-1809) produced some of the most notable texts of the era. Propaganda pamphlets to influence the colonists’ cause also became an essential literary outlet. Poetry was likewise employed in the cause of the revolution. Lyrics of popular songs, such as Yankee Doodle, were often used to convey revolutionary ideas.

Post-independence, Founding Fathers, including Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804), and James Madison (1751-1836), continued to use the political essay to convey ideas related to the construction of new government and the future of the country. These include some of the most important texts in American history, for example, the Federalist papers (1787-1788) and, of course, The Declaration of Independence.

The literature of the late 18th and early 19th century was not all political in nature, however. In 1789, William Hill Brown was credited with the publication of the first American novel, The Power of Sympathy. This period also saw some of the first texts published by both freed and enslaved Black authors, including Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773).

EARLY CULTURAL CONTEXT

The cultural trauma of the Civil War produced a permanently altered sense of national consciousness among Americans who lived through it and beyond it. But the war between the states was only one of many phenomena of the late nineteenth century that transformed the United States from a country fundamentally sectionalist in attitude (e.g., New England, South, Midwest, Far West) into a unified nation of the world that would come to consider its regional diversity a vital if mostly secondary trait.

The technological advances that followed the Civil War, particularly in the areas of American transportation and communication, also contributed mightily to the emergence of this new, more unified cultural awareness. In 1860, for example, fewer than thirty thousand miles of railroad existed in the United States, and major sections of the country remained essentially unconnected to each other. By May 1869, however, less than a decade later, as the last rail spike was being driven into the line linking the East and the West at Promontory Point, Utah, the number of miles of railroad crisscrossing the United States had almost tripled to nearly ninety thousand. The expansion of the railroads into every corner of the Union of course made travel throughout the country much easier (thus removing a major impediment to personal mobility that would tend to promote a regional—as opposed to a national—sensibility), but it also had the equally important effect of opening up commerce and communication between different geographical regions to a much larger degree.

Advances in publishing technology after the Civil War also worked to open contact between sections of the United States. Subscriptions to major newspapers and magazines skyrocketed in the 1870s and 1880s as Americans from all over the country grew hungrier for information from beyond their local borders. Already existing periodicals such as the Atlantic Monthly and Harper's Monthly widened their circulations dramatically in the last few decades of the nineteenth century as telegraph and transportation improvements made it possible for them to reach those more distant readers longing for access to these now more broadly focused national publications. Hoping to capitalize on newly opened markets and the increased readership among the American public, hundreds of new magazines appeared for the first time in the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s, including Galaxy, Overland Monthly, Scribner's Monthly, and Century Magazine, to name a few of the most prominent.

Though late-nineteenth-century improvements in transportation and communication helped to foster a larger, more unified conception of an American culture, these advancements also had a simultaneous and somewhat paradoxical effect on the nation's consciousness. Ironically, as Americans seemed to be dismantling sectional boundaries in the 1870s and 1880s by traveling farther from home and by reading a wider variety of publications from across the United States, they were at the same time made newly aware of regional differences in speech and manners through contact with those people and places beyond their immediate milieus. This rediscovery of regional diversity in the context of a budding national culture would prove to have profound implications for the establishment of an indigenous American voice in literature in the decades following the Civil War.