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Unit 5: American Literature

 
   

Early Fiction
Transcendentalists
Power of Imagination
New Visions of America
Reform and Liberation
Regionalism
A New Wave
Sympathetic Views
Rebellious Spirit
The Modernists
The Lost Generation
Harlem Renaissance
New Drama
Depression, Realism and Escapism
Postwar Voices and the "Beat Generation"
New American Voices

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From the beginning of American history to the present day, American literature has recorded the story of a quest. At different times the quest has taken different forms. In the 16th century Europeans came to the New World in search of the lost continent of Atlantis. They came looking for the golden "cities of Cibola" that haunted Coronado's imagination. They searched for the fabled Northwest Passage to the Orient.

Covered Wagons

These fantastic dreams changed in time to more down-to-earth dreams of success. These dreams brought millions of young men and women from farms and small towns to cities in the hope of winning fame and fortune. At times the quest was a religious pilgrimage. For example, the Puritans hoped the New World would become a New Canaan, where a chosen people might at last build a society of which god would approve. The Mormons who trekked across the plains to Utah were inspired by a similar vision. Other pioneers (and many later Americans as well) were pulled westward neither by financial nor by religious ambitions. They were simply restless. Whether they traveled by covered wagon or by automobile trailer, they believed that being on the road was better than staying put. The questing of the American people has indeed been a drama of many parts. In one way or another, however, it has always been a "pursuit of happiness". American literature is the continuous narrative of that pursuit

Early Fiction

Washington Irving

Writers of the post-Revolutionary period had been embarrassed that America did not have much of a history. Washington Irving (1783-1859) solved this problem by inventing a history. His History of New York (1809) is supposedly an account of the Dutch settlement of Manhattan Island. With this work Irving furnished America with its first myth—hero, Father Knickerbocker. In "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow", Irving contributed even more memorable characters to his legendary recreation of the American past. In his accounts of his history of The Alhambra (1832), the fabulous palace of the Moors in Granada, Spain, Irving also demonstrated that an American writer need not write only about America in order to remain a patriot.

Cowboys

His Tour on Prairies (1835) showed Irving's interest in the literary possibilities of the West. Here, however, he was poaching on the literary territory of fellow New Yorker James Fenimo Cooper (1789-1851). Cooper's novel The Spy (1821) was an exciting story of espionage in New York during the Revolution, but he did not really hit his stride as an author until he turned to The Pioneers (1823). This was the first of the five great romances known as the Leather—Stocking Tales. Surpassing Irving as a mythmaker, Cooper introduced in The Pioneers the fabulous woodsman, Natty Bumppo. He was the forerunner of all heroic forest scouts, bear hunters, and cowboys of later American novels and films. The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840), and The Deerslayer (1841) pursued Natty's career both forward and backward in time, from the first flush of manhood to his death as an old man on the western plains.

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American Beginnings
The Political System in the United States
American Economy
Religion in the United States
American Literature
Education in the United States
Social Movements of the 1960s
Social Problems in the United States
Technology in America
Scenic America
Sports in America
Early American Jazz
Quiz