Literature

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American Literature: Prose, fiction and nonfiction of the American colonies and the United States, written in the English language from about 1600 to the present. This literature captures America’s quest to understand and define itself. For its first 200 years American prose reflected the settlement and growth of the American colonies, largely through histories, religious writings, and expedition and travel narratives. Fiction appeared only after the colonies gained independence, when the clamor for a uniquely American literature brought forth novels based on events in America’s past. With a flowering of prose in the mid-1800s, the young nation found its own voice. By then fiction had become the dominant literary genre in America.

In the early 1800s America faced a difficult challenge: how to create its own culture. Calls for an American literature began during the Revolution and became more frequent and urgent as independence was assured.
Over the course of the 19th century the country progressed from an agricultural economy concentrated on the Eastern seaboard to an industrialized nation that spanned the continent. With the dramatic changes in the nation came dramatic changes in its literature. When the century opened, only a handful of novels had been written, but by mid-century American fiction rivaled the best in the world. Biography and history remained strong; religious writing, on the other hand, had substantially declined in importance.

B American Romanticism
During the late 1700s and early 1800s, romanticism was the dominant literary mode in Europe. In reaction to the Enlightenment and its emphasis on reason, romanticism stressed emotion, the imagination, and subjectivity of approach. Until about 1870 romanticism influenced the major forms of American prose: transcendentalist writings, historical fiction, and sentimental fiction.

B1 Transcendentalism
Like romanticism, transcendentalism rejected both 18t...