Shedding New Identity in the Twenty-First Century

Shedding New Identity in the Twenty-First Century O

There was a diverse oral tradition of literature among Native American tribal cultures.

Native American cultures worshipped sacred persons, deities, and even animals or plants.

The political and social order of the tribes also varied: councils, theocracies, and democracies

Precolonial American literature took the form of creation stories, legends, songs, tales, riddles, proverbs, fairy tales, and epics.

The coming of the English colonists ...

One. brought about the written aspect of American Literature;

Two. early accountants' exploits in the New World became part of the American fabric while providing documentation for their countrymen in England;

Three. notable texts included narratives from John Winthrop, William Bradford, and Captain John Smith.

A great deal of American literature advances the tenets of

Puritanism. O

Puritan works served to transform the colonized and to ensure that the colonizers would walk the right path. O O

Prominent names of Puritan literature are:

Thomas Hooker

Jonathan Edwards

Roger Williams

Edward Johnson

Cotton Mather

Edward Taylor

Anne Bradstreet

Michael Wigglesworth O

The historical period of the American Revolution brought about the rise of intellectuals who molded the identity of the new country. O

Among the founding Fathers of America, the writings of Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson were especially powerful. O

The theater scene and the novel were also on the rise in the eighteenth century.

William Dunlap and Royall Tyler - the plays were infused with the theme of love for their newly liberated nation.

William Hill Brown and Charles Brockden Brown - the earliest American novelist.

Washington Irving - wrote the story "Rip Van Winkle."

James Fenimore Cooper - wrote the novel "The Last of the Mohicans."

The literary movements of transcendentalism and romanticism surged in the nineteenth century. O

Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Ralph Waldo Emerson produced works espousing the transcendentalist views of social reformation and moral excellence.

The distinct works of Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville brought American flavor to the Romantic Movement that originated in Europe.

The division and tension caused by the Civil War led to the creation of realistic and passionate works. O

Cabin (anti-slavery).

Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's

William Gilmore Simm's The Sword and the Distaff (pro-slavery).

The works of Mark Twain, Bret Harte, George W. Cable, and Henry Timrod were among the texts that transcended their regional confines.

In the nineteenth century, American fiction went from the realism of William Dean Howells to the psychological mastery of Henry James and Edith Wharton.

Poetry was revolutionized by Emily Dickinson and in the early twentieth century, Ezra Pound and E.E. Cummings continued to push the boundaries of the genre.

Other powerful poets included Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg.

In the early nineteen hundreds, fictionists drew from ideas like the Marxian social theory and the new psychology.

Writers of drama include Ernest Hemingway, John Steinback, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe Eugene O'Neill as the lead.

O'Neill was followed by Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Maxwell Anderson, and Philip Barry in the aftermath of World War I. Exceptional writers include Langston Hughes, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and Countee Cullen.

Contemporary Times; A Snapshot

The twentieth marked literary criticism in America

A movement influenced by the poet Ezra Pound. Critics like Edmund Wilson, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and Malcolm Cowley pioneered the highly analytical study of several different literary genres.

In the nineteen sixties and seventies, novelists like Saul Bellow, Hortense Calisher, John Updike, William Burroughs, and Joyce Carol Oates depicted the hollow, tense life of contemporary America.

Poets like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, and Allen Ginsberg became the leaders of the beat generation.