American literature
Query URLs
https://term.museum-digital.de/md-de/tag/70773
- Note
- American literature is literature written or produced in the United States of America and in the colonies that preceded it. The American literary tradition thus is part of the broader tradition of English-language literature, but also includes literature of other traditions produced in the United States and in other immigrant languages. Furthermore, a rich tradition of oral storytelling exists amongst Native American tribes.
The American Revolutionary Period (1775–1783) is notable for the political writings of Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson. An early novel is William Hill Brown´s The Power of Sympathy published in 1791. Writer and critic John Neal in the early-mid nineteenth century helped advance America´s progress toward a unique literature and culture, by criticizing predecessors like Washington Irving for imitating their British counterparts and influencing others like Edgar Allan Poe. Edgar Allan Poe took American poetry and short fiction in new directions. Ralph Waldo Emerson pioneered the influential Transcendentalism movement; Henry David Thoreau, author of Walden, was influenced by this movement. The conflict surrounding abolitionism inspired the writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe and by slave narratives, such as those by Frederick Douglass. Nathaniel Hawthorne´s The Scarlet Letter (1850) explored the dark side of American history, as did Herman Melville´s Moby-Dick (1851). Major American poets of the nineteenth century include Walt Whitman, Melville, and Emily Dickinson. Mark Twain was the first major American writer to be born away from the East Coast. Henry James achieved international recognition with novels like The Portrait of a Lady (1881).
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