AMERICAN LITERATUREThe concept of frontierAmerica is very stoned in its ways; people who fled there looking for freedom established in the coast and called that land New England. They were looking for freedom of worship, because there was a reformation in the English church: the king became the head of the church and they changed the language from Latin to English or vernacular. Some people became protestant and other, like the Anglo- Catholics as they were called, fled to America. At that time in England people who didnt follow the reformation and practised other religions were expulsed of the country.In New England, the problem was that they were poor on natural resources whereas the south (Florida, Alabama, Georgia, both Californias...) was very rich.Contrary to the people in the North, the people who colonized the southern regions came to America looking for wealth. They were also from England and English speakers, they didnt have much future in England (2nd or 3rd sons of a wealthy family that werent going to inherit) so they came to America and became farmers, cultivating tobacco and cocoa. The cocoa was especially hard to cultivate because it required a sheer number of workers, slaves mostly. Those slaves came from Africa, sold them to the South farms. At the time slavery was widespread and seen as a normal thing.In literature, the South and the North talked about very different things. In the North talked about ethical and religious questions about the origin. Ex: the Scarlett Letter. In the South the literature was a boring kind of literature, the gothic novel (castles, caves, vampires and such), a high form of Romanticism practiced for example by Edgar Allan Poe. They didnt have ethical problems, even with slavery. Slaves were not paid money as the North workers but they were housed, feed and taken care off. In fact, most of the time they were better off that the workers, that earned very little money and didnt have any rights (they were fired without reason for example).The Americans believe that you can always improve, go west if you are not well were you are. They are always moving, looking for a better future, their idea is that you dont have to stay in the same place; they go with the frontier spirit, moving houses, cities and states. This is the so called American Dream. The movement is always east to west, in Europe there is a centre of culture, a capital, where writers concentrate, but in America they were all over the place, even if the publishing world was more or less around New York. The writers are totally independent; they have no schools, no groups or institutions, no movements.We can analyze this in the novel for example. In Europe, the novel and their characters were social people living together in a city and they wrote about social themes as marriages, social and political live, etc. In Jane Austen or Emily Bronte the theme is how to find the perfect husband. The story is in a circulate manner: young girl marries and has a happy ending, what you do in a dinner or tea party, how you talk to a woman if youre not in the same social circle, etc.In America the novels are about alone heroes or even heroines in a few cases that are looking for their destiny to confront it (sometimes accompanied by their best friend). It is s solitary hero looking for himself. Ex: Moby DickIn Europe, the solitude its not something people relish in, it comes as a natural thing but it is not something you enjoy. In America it is normal to emigrate alone, without your family. They use vehicles to overcome the solitude, to feel less alone: sex, alcohol (to get drunk is as a consequence of drinking, they did not drink to get drunk like today).The literature of the end of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th century was written by people of aristocracy background and good education. They were, both in America and in England, puritans.They wrote about religious themes mostly, the Bible was very important; it set a fixed role for men and woman. A particular form of literature of the time was the diary, because you write for yourself but at the same time you also write for a second person (your future self). The poems that the author wrote were not meant to be published, they wrote for themselves or, at most, for their family. It was a private type of literature, extended to the 17th and 18th centuries. In England, as mentioned before, there was a reformation in the church. Because of the king being made the head of the church, the monasteries were dissolved and as a consequence, the owners of the lands where the monasteries were (the richer members of the community), lost their lands to the crown. Also, 10% of everything that was grown or traded in the country went to the church and because of the reformation, passed to the state. This reformation also set free a lot of celibates that werent married and had no children; this caused a displacement of population because they went to America.The most popular form of literature at the time was the travel books, because as the New World was discovered, everyone wanted to know about it. There were a lot of records of voyages, settlements, discoveries, etc.Anne BradstreetAnne Bradstreet was the first poet woman to be published in both, England and America. This doesnt mean that there were the first texts to be published in America, because before the English, there were Spanish, Dutch and German settlements so the first literature produced in America was written in Spanish, Dutch and German. The first printed books were in German and were published in Pennsylvania.Bradstreet had puritan ancestry and lived in a puritan environment where men and women were very different. Women were expected to manage the house-hold, cook, clean, attend to the children, etc. Anne believed that that was her duty, so it came before writing. She was an educated woman and spoke several languages, including Greek and Latin. Her father and her husband were governors and as a good puritan woman she believed that marriage was a gift that God gives you if you are entitle to paradise, because God loves you and is illuminating you.In the 17th century and early 18th century, the literature of the middle states and the south and north starts was very different. The north colonies were concerned about the afterlife, they believed in either salvation or damnation (the Calvinist said that for a thousand damned, only one is saved), and were deeply religious (puritans). They persecuted every other religion. In contrast, in the middle states people were quite free in terms of religion. They were colonized by Catholics but they were the first to defend the freedom of cult.At that time, the south was a long collection of plantations that were owned by rich people or people making money. Their publications were completely at odds with the ones in the north, they had a culture of newspapers, people started to publish for them.In terms of formal literature, there was an opposition between the North and the South: South North Develop of personality vs.Education of character

In the south, people believed in making recipes on how to be happy. This is probably the most significant trait of their literature.In the north, they wanted people to know what they had to do and how to behave in order to improve in the future.We tend to believe that the south is stuck in the past but thats not quite the case, the witch trials and hunt was religious in approach and had no political connotations.The regionalism was very relevant for American Literature; the first literature in English in America deals with discoveries or contrasts (people who came from the old world vs. Natives).In the south, people wrote books about good things trying to attract people, telling them to come to America and get rich together, whereas the puritans in the north were fighting it, because they had hard conditions of life and didnt want any more people.The puritans believed that fiction, the most popular genre at the time, was against the Bible because it was not real, untrue and sinful and they had to fight that. Benjamin FranklinHe is an example of the literature of the middle states from the revolutionary period.The middle states are pragmatic and philosophically oriented in their literature. In the 19th the American novel is deeply historically based (Wuthering Heights) compared to the romantic novels of Europe.The middle states are considered to be not important enough but it is important their background to understand the revolutionary era writers and the religious persecution. They were, geographically speaking, composed by towns, small centres of population, and it affected the way they wrote and published.Benjamin Franklin wanted to be a recognized author so he made his works to be read by masses. He learned to be a printer and knew the actual mechanics of printing (which was very difficult, you had to be very skilful). Originally, the printer was legally responsible for the content of the book or newspaper he published (in England). James Joyce, for example, was banned from publishing Ulysses because no printer dared to print it (they could get arrested). Franklin was a man that wanted to make sure people knew the world was changing, evolving. He investigated the beginning of electricity and discovered the lightning rod. He believed in change and progress and believed that things would improve for the better. He was also an important politician, he influenced the constitution, the declaration of independence and he spent a lot of time in England trying to influence the parliament about the colonies.The legislation imposed upon the colonies heavy taxes but because they had no representation in the parliament considered themselves free from them. The paper, for example, had a tax so high it was extremely expensive to write or any activity connected with it. In Pennsylvania, people had to pay also taxes to the Penn family because the owned the whole state and the final say in what was or was not legal.Franklin spent 12 years in England trying to enact some sort of legislation in favour of the America families. He was ambassador of the Independent States, the first in centuries because a new nation being born was really rare. He tried to get rebuilt most of the most authorial laws about the colonies.His phrases were strongly helpful and significant for American literature, they probably are not original but he made them typically American. We associate them with the pursuit of happiness; if you find yourself failing you can always start a new life and reinvent yourself. In the early 19th century we have two important novelists, not because of their literature in itself but for their transcendence: Washington Irving: he wrote two short stories, sleepy hollow (a headless horse rider. A legend that takes place in Sleepy Hollow, a real place in New York) and Rip Van Winkle (a man wakes up 20 years later not recognizing anything. This idea is similar from European literature like Robinson Crusoe and Gullivers Travels. The character is a lazy Dutch man that prefers going to sleep than doing anything. We see how he is extremely struck by the world he finds, his family (sons, wife and even grandsons) grew up while he was asleep and he feels out of place. These two legends of short stories dont deal with normal themes, the Halloween question is present, and normally they arent significant enough, but from the culture point of view they are. 30 years before Poe became popular these stories set precedence; we can see the connection in the Dutch culture used by Poe. He was 10 years in Spain as a diplomat so he has novels about Granada. He didnt earn his living from writing, nor Cooper, but if we look at Poe, we can see that in fact lived off writing. He was the figure of the writer: died young, alcoholic, a bohemian and an outsider. James Fenimore Cooper: his novels are very long, they were meant to be published in 3 volumes. He is significant about how we see the revolutionary and post-revolutionary America. He wrote a long list of novels about people who was settled in the west (Pennsylvania, New York) and first introduced into literature the Native Americans, cinema icons (how the west was destroyed or conquered-depending in the point of view).Both Irving and Cooper are historic novelists because in the poque of realism (Victorian novel) they werent dealing with the state of affairs at the time (realistic novel), they were fixated on the reality of the contemporary world. What Irving and Cooper dealt with had disappeared 15 years ago. The idea is a recreation of the past from the nostalgic point of view, an emotional perspective because we tend to think that the past is always better. This is called the Ubi-sunt theme, we assume that the writers depend of that lamentation of the past and in fact what they do is recreate a pat that people didnt seen experienced or heard of. Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle evolutes and eventually the genre that they set became the ghost story.Edgar Allan PoeHe started a type of fiction genre and introduced the terms and forms for it with the Mask of the Red Death and the Murders of the Rue Morgue. The Mask/Masque of the Red Death is the archetype of a mystery story that involves a crime the majority of times.The Murders of the Rue Morgue is a detective type of fiction. In this type of story, there is always a narrator, usually in 1st person, that is a different person that the detective. This first person narrator is beneficial for the story but it has also a disadvantage, the reader doubts the story is realistic because the narrator cannot understand all that happens nor all the facts. The detective in these stories is always connected directly or indirectly with the police. This was later developed by Arthur Conan Doyle in Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock is the detective, Watson the narrator and the Inspector Leblanc the connection with the police.Why the police needs the presence of a detective is a symbol of how the world was changing and becoming more urban, the cities were enormous so the police force needed someone specialized in crimes to help them solve them. In these stories, the key for solving the mystery is in a word misreading or something linguistic related. Normally, at the end, the detective gets all the suspects together and explains the mystery in a logical manner and explains also how he solved it. This was not used by Poe, but we have to understand that the genre evolved during 100 years and not all the traits of it come from Poe.We also have to remember that Poes texts were read more in the French translated version from the English than in the English one and this caused a lot of misreading.In the late 19th century was signed in Berne the first legislation of copyright by the majority of countries. Before that, as soon as something was published it was open to anyone, so some authors that didnt publish at the same time in London and in New York would be victims of plagiarism. It was developed a theory of the short story, essays were made on what aspects should have the short story to become a gender in its own, different from a story. Poe, for example, wrote first how the short story should be and then he wrote them. These aspects were: The death of a beautiful woman, in order to emphasize the emotional aspect and the graphic aspect of death, that its the most universal thing in our lives. A single line of plot, only one aspect should be developed. One main character only, the rest were a sort of off-shorts of the main one.The novels of the time were too long and therefore not the highest form of literature.Nathaniel HawthorneHe divided the general narrative in: Novel photographic realism: in Britain, they wrote about what they believed to be most important, that is to say, people living together. Romance narrative roughly symbolic: in America, in the surface the novels tend to deal with bigger problems than the social one. America was not urbanized like Britain was and people didnt have contact with many people so they were not concerned with social manners.Hawthorne was trying to define the differences between the English and the American novel. He said that the American novel was romance.Book publishing was very expensive at the time so the shortest the story was the better because that way it could be published in a magazine that came out once a month and there were cheaply produced with not so many taxes. This could explain why Poe insisted so much in the short story.This distinction can be useful still today to understand the question on length in the Victorian English novels (ex. Charles Dickens). They could have been trying to approximate the possibilities in the American market. The Victorian novels were published in magazines by chapters during two years, thats why in those two years there werent books printed physically speaking. When they were printed, they came out divided in 3 parts because the market of the time demanded three stock books. This was due to the circulating libraries, they lent the books tome by tome at one person at a time for 1 penny each, this way it was cheaper and reading became popular as the only form to pass the time.There were two basic types of romance novel: The symbolical and individual in terms of political freedom, religion and destiny The gothic one. They were set in the past like the middle ages or the time of the gothic architectural style when in fact, they were written in the last past of the 18th century.The historical novels were set 100 years before they were written. Hawthorne used this technique in the Scarlet Letter, who was set in 1696 but published in 1850. The narrative structure was not very different from the one used by Cervantes. In the first chapter of the Scarlet Letter, someone found a manuscript that contained the story that the book told.This pattern of using historical events to get across the point is nothing new. Therefore, the historical novel has to be read in a metaphorical manner linking it with those historical facts. The length of these novels was roughly 200 pages long, the third of their equals in Britain. In 1850s were published very important novels like Jane Eyre, Vanity Fair, the Scarlett Letter, Moby Dick and Wuthering Heights.It was also published in 1852 Uncles Tom cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. This book was considered to be the starting point of the campaign against slavery that evolved into a civil war in 1865. Uncle Tom was an Afro-American old man that Harriet Beecher developed and got the attention of the whole North by writing about sentimental things.We have to take into account that slavery was only one of the reasons of the Civil War; the real problem was that the North was very different from the South and they clashed. They had two different economical systems, the north made a living out of industry and the workers had a salary and in the south they lived of agriculture with the help of slaves. Even if the North was fighting against slavery, the slaves were housed and fed, thing that sometimes were not achieved by the industry workers, which had very harsh work conditions.The important thing is that in the 1850`s, there was a difference between British literature (that was in the second industry revolution, the railway) and American literature; the first really important texts were published disconnected from Britain. That period was called The first American Renaissance, the second one would come later, in the 20th century with the Lost generation writers. Moby Dick is an example of those important novels. Its still read today because the British, after the First World War, despised anything that dealt with the past, they believed that anything remotely Victorian in atmosphere had to be rejected, and they blamed the past ways of life of the carnage of the war. Moby Dick was greatly appreciated because it dealt with questions deeply significant for the people left alive after the war. The narrative technique used in Moby Dick is the 1st person narrator. Melville considered it the best way to get across the point, which is surprising because normally it is used the 3rd person narrator. This technique is also used in Jane Eyre (the first lady with a job), that is considered to be the archetype of 1st person narrator. Since this point onwards, a line of novels was published and developed in what the feminists call a long line of woman writers.In Moby Dick, very little of what the 1st person narrator tells happens to him, in over a thousand pages it appears very lightly in the first few chapters and in the last 3 as a witness, the rest doesnt apparently concern him.Roughly speaking, the 1st person narrator is normally used because it concerns him, but not in Moby Dick.Call me Ishmael is the first phrase of Moby Dick; it refers to the biblical name Ishmael. Ishmael was the son of Abraham and a slave. Abraham and his wife Sara were very old and Sara was beyond child age. She believed that her husband needed a son so she encouraged him to take a young slave as wife and conceive a son with her. The problem was that at the same time the slave was pregnant so was Sara, it was like a miracle. Sara named his son Isaac and later on God asked Abraham to sacrifice him as prove of his faith. Because of that Sara became overprotective of Isaac and eventually saw Ishmael as a bad influence for him, so she asked Abraham to exile him.Ishmael in Moby Dick is the narrator. Ahab, the captain, was so ill that not even dogs could lick his wounds; he was the ultimate evil character because he persecuted the whale, seen as the Mesas. Finally, we have Jhona, who was thrown of the ship because he was not following God commands and that was giving the crew and the captain bad luck, and was eaten and regurgitated 3 days later by the whale. It represents the 3 days that Christ spent on the cross. These three characters were associated with different types of social and religious groups.Presumably, Ahab is the protagonist but he is the antagonist because the protagonist is usually given more line. The whale represents the antagonist of Quakerism (Ahab was a Quaker, a part of a brotherhood) because animals, as the Bible says, are supposed to be dumb and the whale is not, its out to kill him, so he tries to kill the whale to avenge his lost leg. The harpooners are also important because they represent different approaches to life, sections of American society.Moby Dick was the first novel published in England and it was not very popular, not even 500 copies were sold, they were 800 pages about the hunting of whales in the first person narrator. It was published without and ending, without epilogue, so it was quite difficult to understand how anyone could told a story when he was dead (in the epilogue is where it is explained that the captain is alive). It was published in three volumes as usual because of the circulating libraries and it was later published in New York for copyright reasons in one volume and with the epilogue. Transcendentalism Thoreau and Emerson represent the 18th century mystical and philosophical movement called transcendentalism. The puritans believed in the literal truth of the Bible but the transcendentalists were less fixated on that; they believed that they could arrive at the experience of God from the elements that surrounded them (buildings, parks...) so they wrote about those things.Thoreau, for example, exiled himself and lived alone in a cabin by the lake in Waldey. It is said that he was the first hippy, the first that thought that only in direct and individual communication with nature one can find himself. This search to find ones essence (the ultimate aim of Americans colonial spirit) helps us to find God because God made us, we are his creation, and the deeper we get into ourselves the nearer we are of him.Emily Dickinson She was different from any other poet of the time. She is difficult to understand not because her metaphorical structures or language are difficult but because she doesnt follow the rules or pattern of the traditional English poetry that were expected to be followed.The English poetic tradition depends a lot on accents (Latin feet, stressed syllables), they didnt use rime like Spanish, French or Italian poets or if they did it was a very different kind. Ex: Shakespeare used the iambic (-uu). Dickinson used very peculiar rimes, sometimes with only three words and was very keen on ellipsis. Whitman, the author of Leaves of Grass, made the end of the poem very long, sometimes three whole lines, but Dickinson depended on a much shorter line: trimester, diameter and normally tetrameter. Because of that her poems appeared to be cut or to be a short cut of a regular verse.Another characteristic of her poetry is that she hardly ever uses punctuation signs like full stops or comas. She uses dashes (-), that it is normally an approach to spontaneity. Because of that it is quite difficult to find a connection between the verses of a poem (the ellipsis also contributes with that).Dickinson never published almost anything alive and after her death the people with whom she maintained correspondence discovered beautiful poems between the lines of the letters. She usually wrote in any scrap of paper she could get her hands on, not a notebook. The people who edited and published her work were the modernists writers, that found her poetry, how could they not, very modern.We cannot forget that Dickinson was a very peculiar character and we lack the knowledge to understand her fully and therefore her poetry. An example of this is that she talked to people that went to visit her throw the door of her house, never opening it.She, a lady living by herself, maintaining herself and writing for, again, herself, became an icon figure of the 19th century American woman in the eyes of the feminists.We have to understand that American literature develops at a different pace that the British literature. The English literature had their Glorious revolution in the second half of the 17th century but in America we have a line of development, from puritans (Bradstreet) , to transcendentalists (Melville) to realists (Mark Twain and Henry James).Between 1850 and 1855 were published some of the most important texts in American literature. It 1850 was published the Scarlett Letter, in 1851 the house of seven gambles, in 1852 Uncle Toms Cabin and in 1855 Leaves of Grass by Whitman.WhitmanHe does not follow the rules of poetry, each verse had 3 lines that were 2 or 3 lines long in a page and normally a verse is way smaller than that.The English poetry has accents and pies like the Latin one but Whitman doesnt use rime nor metric, the only thing why the English people of the time considered his texts as poetry was because his verses has the natural rime of a language, like in the Bible for example. His book, Leaves of Grass, was first published in 1855 but every three or four years he added more poems to it; the last edition of the book before he died was in 1892. The poems that he wrote at the end of his life are very different from the ones that appeared in the first edition of the book. The reason of this huge change was the civil war in 1863. In 1850 the compromise of Wilmot was signed by all the union states; it stated that any new states that came into the union wouldnt be a slave state. This created a rift because it that was applied the slave states of the south would eventually be a minority and the North would overpower them. This was the turning point of the war. The south only wanted to be left alone to grow the crops with their methods, but one of these methods was the use of slaves. Coming back to Whitman, he was against slavery at first but eventually he became bitter against the abolitionists (the ones who wanted to abolish slavery) when the time of the civil war came, because he blamed them for bringing or cursing America to war. 20% of the American population died, both from the north and from the south, it was carnage. This change of attitude was reflected in his poetry.In contrast we have Dickinson, who only wrote about what she felt at a certain moment with very simple language. In that sense, she and Whitman were opposites.Mark Twain He was a realist and a rather unpopular writer at the time because nearly all of his books were catalogued as racists, obscene or hoarse. He wrote, published and was understood 20 years after the civil war, which its an enormous amount of time in a new nation with no history as America; but the plots of his books were set roughly 30 years before the war. An example of why his books are considered as racists or obscene if the character called Nigger Jim in Huckleberry Finn. Nigger is a taboo word in America, in fact the book is forbidden for certain ages and not put in the obligatory lists of obligatory reading because of that. The narrative technique in Huckleberry Finn influenced heavily the development of American Literature. The 1st person narrator has the advantage of being more sympathetic to the reader, so the 19th century writers in Britain used it to get across the point. The disadvantage is that its an unreliable narrator, they are economical with the truth and the reader cannot be sure that what it is being said is true or if the narrator has an agenda behind.The story of Huckleberry Finn is set, as we mentioned before, in 1830, a time connected with slavery and the civil war, but it was published in 1880. This question of the liberty of the black slaves and the war was very traumatic for the reader. Marlowe repeats something that he heard someone tell and we have no way of judging if he is being truthful or not because we dont know him. He relies to us a story that he heard an anonymous narrator tell about a man named Kurtz that is apparently Belgium and was given a job to retrieve something from Africa that we dont know of. Marlowe, therefore, is a listener.Henry JamesA year before he died he changed his nationality to British. He died in 1916 in England as a consequence of the 1st W.W. He was much more attached to the English society than to the American one.For reasons of copyright, he published the same text in America and in Europe. He revised them in the first part of the 20th century before he died and thats what we read today. They were given a preface in the edition he did for the New York publishers, it contained the actual design he thought of and how he chose the plot and that helped people understand the texts.He wrote about the innocence of American girls in contrast with the experience that apparently is to be found in European society. He also compares manners and morals of the European society and manners and morals of the American girls of the time (2nd half of the 19th century).A young American girl, normally quite rich, beautiful and innocent, goes to Europe for a long stay and is meant to change. The American girls were probably too free and flighty and in the way to decadence by European perspective. This developed in a moral judgement of the girl. Daisy Miller, for example, dies of malaria because of her approach to the rules that ends up being quite destructive to all American girls. James was born in America but he moved to Europe when he was 20 something and spent the rest of his life there writing about America. This type of writer would be part of the Lost Generation, writers of American Literature that found something extremely attractive and repulsive at the same time in European society. Most of his plots were set in Europe with a majority of American characters.He was the sort of writer that for Europeans would explain how exotic Americans were. His reputation was made by European critics.He developed the question of the point of view, that is to say, whats the angle from which the story is being told.He uses the 1st person narrator and very complicated psychologically or morally speaking characters as narrators. This 1st person narrator is unreliable because he is not aware of his own problems The American literature in general was minimalist, short to the point, bare and aesthetic, with no adjectives and monosyllabic words. Henry James was the opposite; he is extremely complicated in his syntax and different from other American writers, in fact, the syntax was so complex that people started to read his texts but dropped of soon because he appeared to be talking nonstop compared to the other American writers. In terms of style he should belong to the baroque period (circumstantial clauses, parenthesis...). His sentences were more than 1 page long sometimes, with no full stops or paragraphs. His stories appeared to have hardly any change in time, plot or style. How a character interprets reality occupied a thousand pages because thats what we really do every day.His characters were extremely ones, idiotic, mental or crazy. You can hardly ever dream of meeting people like them. James condemns Americans wanting especially in the moral sense; thats what you see in the films, extremely corrupted rich characters that get what they deserve.The innocence, the not knowing, is symbolized in his novels by an America young girl, normally an heiress. She is pure, pristine and naive. She is a portrait of America, she has not learnt the ways of the world and when she comes to Europe falls in love with some European that is going to be her destruction. The girl is destructed by her own naivety, she believed she could go out at night with no danger to the coliseum (a place of disease and immoral plays) without a chaperone and shes bitted by an insect and ends up contracting an apparently mortal fever. Charlotte Perkins Gilman She had a strongly case of depression after giving birth to her daughter. The doctor recommended her the rest cure and she wrote The Yellow Wallpaper reflecting that. In The Yellow Wallpaper the lady has the same problem that Charlotte and is given the same treatment by her doctor, that it is also her husband. The rest cure says that the less intercourse with reality the better, no reading, no writing... any intellectual or social interaction. The lady of the story is keeping a journal in secret and thats the narrative technique used to tell us the story, a very difficult technique to understand.In 1862 an act was enacted saying that anyone who went west (normally west of the Mississippi River) could claim and therefore receive freely a hundred and sixty acres of land (50 hectreas). Americans flocked to the west because of that act. In Europe everything that is in the land and under it belongs to the state but in America in the last part of the 29th century you were the outright owner of everything. From 1890 on, there wasnt any more land free because all of it has already been claimed. This put in relation to the development of the railway in 1969 means a lot, because people could go by train to claim the land, which was a lot faster.There was a rapid succession of movements that were labelled with quite confusing names: Romanticism: truth underneath whatever (ex. The Bible, God rebuilt the truth under a cover up of metaphors, the surface is only a parabola, a story to tell a deeper story; there is always something lurking underneath), symbolism, metaphors. Poe, Hawthorne and Melville tried to be truthful about what was the actual nature, a deeper truth in what we see. Its to write about how you want reality to be, how it should be. Realism: to be truthful to nature one should be as close as possible to the self structure of nature as people saw and understood it. Photography for example shows things as true to reality as could be possible, forgetting that metaphorical deeper truth. Reality as it was perceived by the naked eye, showing people that it could be a near approach to reality. Ex. Madame Bovary, shows how bored could be the life of a housewife and how that boredom led to adultery. Naturalism: the naturalists wanted to apply the highest point of science of the time (Darwin) to society, to the social novel. Society is what it is in account of certain circumstances, when you apply science to reality you end up explaining the most sordid aspects of society. They wanted to convey to society what was reality so they chose to write about themes that applying science could be more dramatic to get across the point. The conclusion was deeply pessimistic or determinist, that is to say, you are born with your destiny so if you are poor you will end up poorer and you got yourself to blame because if you are poor is because you deserve it. The most common themes were drinking, child abuse and prostitution. This change from realism to naturalism can be explained by painting or another art form. In painting, the fashion until then (in the realism period) was the concept of indoors or in studios settings and historical or religious subjects and scenes. The impressionism is a dramatically change in subject matters and the setting is not outdoors. This type of painting was full of colours and of texture whereas the old paintings were smooth with no colour mixing. This translates into the novel in the sense of deeper or more colours narratives and narrator, blocks of colours and not blending one colour with another. In the novel the new fashion was to talk about every day or trivial matters. They were trying to recreate, to resemble, the painting of the time (no copying); everything that was respectable enough to be visited in a museum was recreated and the centre of the painting has to occupy the centre of the composition or text.

Theodore Dreiser His conditions of birth are developed in his writing. The type of novel he wrote contained subject matters that until then didnt exist. Until then, writers had not dealt with what was considered to be too daring a subject. Sister Carrie was a too specific portrait of American reality so it received many critics.Sister Carrie was a young girl from a small town that began to work in a factory and ended up as a mistress and an actress (not a good reputational job). If the girl was doing something immoral according to the morals of the time, the novel finished with the lady being punished by dead but Dreiser made Carrie only unhappy but content and killed the man. Novel losses interest in the action and plot and becomes interested or focused in the inner life of the character and his perception of reality, no matter if its not true or mistaken. The different changes in the character became the matter of the novel.

Perception vs. Reality The concept of the American Dream comes from the last phrase of the Declaration of Rights The pursuit of happiness and is further set in the American Constitution. The idea is that we can do anything in the search oh happiness. You can always forge your own fortune, your own future, not having to be constraint by your family name and origins, your gender, race, etc. This idea attracted many people, you could be yourself and be successful, an opportunity to be whatever you want. This limitless search for happiness starts to show cracks or faults around the time of the 1st world war (1914-1918). The states entered the war in 1917, three years later than all the other countries that had already been ruined economically and physically. Because the competence had been momentarily destroyed (not completely wiped out however), the states became the world power. It was the first war that involved the entire globe, a world-wide conflict, and the consequences are still with us today.The American president at that time, Wilson, was the one who successfully convinced the states to go into the war; the population was reluctant to enter the conflict because they wanted anything to do with the colonial empires. The war was an enormous shock psychologically speaking, 20 million people died and that heavily influenced the literature of the time. The American writers had seen people like themselves been wiped out by the million and acquired what we call the survivor guilt. That writers are called the Lost Generation writers because they didnt understand the concept of a future for themselves, some of them had been killed and some didnt know where were they going, they has lost their dreams. The title of lost generation was assigned to them in Europe, where they were living. For 20 years (1918-1938), the majority of American writers fled to Europe and because of that saw America in a different light. They went there to live because living in Europe at the time was very cheap compared to America. Gertrude Stein, an American Jew critic who died in France, where she lived at the time, was the one to coin the team Lost Generation. HemmingwayHe was in the war in the Italian front as an ambulance driver, so he saw a lot of things; he is the epitome of writer that had been influenced by what he saw in the war. He came from the Middle West, from Michigan, and they no longer appeared to have the connection with the colonial European countries and their background. The Middle West within America is old fashioned, the values of farmers. Hemmingway style resembles the Bible and appears obsessed with the war, his way to look at America was one of a frontier guy, not a European corrupted one. His reputation was created in Europe; Europeans considered his texts the essence of American literature, a particular style of writing that resembles that of a newspaper or a journal, with the four W (why, when, where, who), short sentences with no secondary clauses, not meaning hidden that the reader had to understand and almost all declarative sentences.In A farewell to arms, we can see what is implied in a newspaper style, as always to the point, ice verb style, no adjectives nor adverbs, simply facts and the rest is for the reader to know even if its not said. In Hills like white elephants, for example, a couple is waiting for the train and the woman is asking Would you love me if I do it? In the surface it appears to be about essentially nothing but it is a realistic approach to nature: we jump into the deep end and hear things and we have to understand the meaning, we dont explain it. If you find no point then there is no point probably, life is like that sometimes. He lived in Europe, and A farewell to Arms is his second novel, set in Europe. It is a war novel, autobiographical with an American character (an ambulance driver in the Italian front) that left the front to go to Switzerland with his live Catherine in order to marry her and life peacefully, but they have a child that dies before being born and the girl herself dies giving birth. It s a tragedy that shows that fighting and whatever happens out of fighting has no meaning. The title has more than one layer of meaning, because as before the war, the novels were that way, they wanted to be different because those texts were corrupted by the world that had produced the war. The novels were circular, spiral or with a fragmented time sequence, no ending, no start, the popular thing to use were the flashbacks and flash-forward and the beginning in media res, whereas before the war the novel has a lineal time sequence. This shows that there is no past, present and future, all can happen at the same time. Ex. You are in the present but you live in the past and dream about the future.This way of writing presents understanding problems, so to warn the reader, to overcome this in order to get across the message, they chose certain titles that emphasized to the reader this multiple layers of meaning, the tip of the iceberg is visible but not the rest. They thought that you had to make an extraordinary effort to understand the text, as extraordinary as the one we put to understand life, that its very difficult.As a consequence of the First World War, there was an economic boom in 1920 of extraordinary proportions, partially because the war reparations that Germany had to pay to the winning side. Another reason was the consumer power. The production of automobiles became huge whereas before only a few very expensive ones were sold, now people brought them quite easily. The states were going throw a spiral growth circle. The radio was to them what its for us today the television, the most popular form of entertainment. Jazz came from the Afro-American clubs to the high spheres of white society and became very popular. The cinema was also improved; the sound was implemented and was cheaper. All those aspects helped the economy to develop. Also, we have to remember the salary, the money that 5 million soldiers brought home. Another enormous revolution was the vote for woman. In the past, it was said that woman were easily influenced by the priest, for example, so its the best not to give them the vote because it went it went to the church. The woman, in order to look as different as possible from the Victorian era (an emblem of the war carnage), tried to look as androgynous as possible and bandaged their chest, cut their hair in a bob cut (the Cleopatra style), wore skirts above the knee and so on. In the 1920s texts was emphasized how different the ladys looked from their mothers in terms of hair skirt length.In art, they changed from art Noveau (paisley) to art Deco (the needle form of the Chrysler building in New York), that is to say, from organic figures to geometrical ones).Another important fact was the prohibition of no selling liquor, because apparently t was bad for the economic growth; it prevented people from not going to the job on Monday. Drinking in itself was not banned, but selling it was illegal.Fitzgerald We have to take into account that he was catholic that at the time was an extraordinary small minority, so as a consequence he despised money. For him, it is very difficult for a rich man to go to heaven, as difficult as passing a camel for a needle hole. He was also of Irish descendant and was considered an outsider.In his texts he talks about problems and decadence below the surface of the American Dream. He is the sort of writer that prefers a type of narrator that does not come necessarily from the centre of society.In the Great Gatsby we can find very particular things, starting with the title. The suffix By in Gatsby is usually used to name a place in English so, even if the title appears to be self explanatory, it is not. He uses a first person narrator called Nick Carraway, that sounds quite catholic but Nick its the traditional term to name the devil. He is an unreliable narrator, an outsider not looking objectively, that has nothing to be at all with the main character. He is also highly educated and meant to be difficult to understand, multilayered meaning with warning in the title. This Nick was the first intellectual narrator in 200 years of literature in America.Fitzgerald was very popular at the time for the short stories that he wrote for magazines. He was considered to be funny, not a serious writer. His novels didnt sell because they werent considered to be high round literature. He, however, considered his short stories a prostituted form of his writing.It was in the aftermath of the Second World War that his novels became highly popular and an icon of American literature. The Great Gatsby had become the reading text of reference for the American soldiers overseas; they demanded a hundred thousand of copies of the book to the government. The soldiers saw the book with nostalgia, a reminder of a much more golden past after the atomic boom in Japan, when they truly realized that billions of people could disappear in an instant. They made Fitzgerald reputation, contrary to his predecessors reputation that was made by French critics. In the 1930s the approach to literature was deeply pessimistic, artistic and experimental, but in the 1920s was optimistic. With the 18th amendment of the constitution came the prohibition of selling liquor. This prohibition caused the mafia to appear because it was very good business to sell liquor, it has an enormous profit. This aspect is reflected in the Great Gatsby; Fitzgerald was the one who brought this side of the economy (the mafia) to literature.After the war, there were too many woman and they were without a future in terms of marriage, so they changed and the world atmosphere turned, the modern woman with short hair and skirts were called Flappers. Before the war, that a woman went out alone to dance was unheard of and if they went with a man they werent visible nor noticed. The parties became popular whereas the danced in the 18th and 19th had been before. In literature, the parties became a symbol, like dances before, a rather complicated mechanism where people was known on account of their ability to dance, the writer used it as a metaphor of how able the characters were to understand each other and the meaning of life.A good example of the change in the role of woman is the Great Gatsby, where Daisy, the driver, kills Wilsons wife and Gatsby is killed by Wilson because he thinks Gatsby is the responsible. That connection between a car, driving and a woman is the most powerful image for the future; it shows a modern lady in charge of herself, a driver that leads her own life, probably out of necessity.Until the 1920s the idea was first religious freedom, social freedom and economical freedom. This idealistic approach to life was broken by Fitzgerald, who said that what we were looking for was, in fact, the acquisition of material thing. This changed the Americans perception of themselves forever. The narrative technique was based on an extraordinarily complex novel and multilayered, that is to say, with many layers of meaning. This was because they thought that as life is almost unintelligible, literature had to mirror that. From the 20`s onwards, literature is meant to not be understood.

The Great DepressionTwo examples of writers of this period are Steinbeck and West. Because of the Wall Street Crash in 1929, the prizes dropped, getting lower and lower. The unemployment rate was 30%, enormous, and the unemployed people didnt have a safety net in terms of social security. There wasnt anything to eat and no jobs to be found so people travelled from site to site.Dust Bowl. His value cut in half from one day to the next because the paper money tumbled down in value enormously. Farms were destroyed because of how little the farmers were paid if they sold their products. America saw poverty in sectors that no one has seen before.Steinbeck showed the word the underside of the economic boom, using the migrant population of Californias farmers as a mirror of that situation. He wrote a chronicle where the migrants in the California factories were being exploited, mostly migrants from the south (Mexico). California represented the epitome of Paradise, sun, sand... and the migrants exploitation is the underbelly of that paradise.In contrast, West chronicles focused in the entertainment industry (Hollywood) and how that building is constructed by underpaid people.Both of them are good examples of writing in the 1930s, where there as a lot of political commitment (in Europe you either wrote for the communist line for the fascist line).Faulkner Faulkner tried to show the consequences of the lake of poverty in America.The poor whites that didnt have jobs or money for food were called white trash; the Afro-Americans were beneath the poverty line.A topic or idea that was present in his novels was the believe that the stare or moral, social and economic poverty of the south could be explained with the past question of slavery. It was like a payment for the slavery that was considered a sin. His writing has a strongly experimental technique, if life is difficult the literature has to mirror it (the Stream of Consciousness technique). The first novels he wrote were edited because they were no punctuation points. Faulkner didnt allow his texts to be edited while he was alive so they were at first almost unintelligible. His works were an entire monologue (direct or indirect) of the mind of the character. You are put inside the mind of extreme characters like idiots, blacks or retarded so the reading is extremely difficult. In 1929 he published his first novel. It was about a mentally retarded character, Benji. The reading is difficult because he doesnt understand the connection between cause and effect, that is to say, how the door opens if you put a key into the key hole. The only window into the world that you have is the one of a boy with the mental age of a 2 year old child. He is also deaf so he has no power, no words to communicate; Faulkner, as implied narrator, has to translate into words the non-words of Benjis perception. You understand he is evil because of the consequences of his acts not because he thinks about any moral believing about whats wrong or not, he is not educated to do so. An example of this could be Macbeth. He murdered a lot of people because he was convinced by his wife, Lady Macbeth that has lost her reason. Life is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury: the most fitting title for his novel. Faulkner technique in A Rose for Emily is what we call southern Gothic style, a certain type of romantic writing.The fiction that was popular in the 18th century British literature was normally set in north Europe using basements, cellars... graphically meant to present us whats psychologically deviant from this northern countries point of view of the south countries. Ex. Frankenstein. It is the name of the doctor that created the monster, an allegory of the overreaching aspect of science, people that believed themselves to be God-like to give life).In the second half of the 20th century, the writers of the south used this type of writing about something macabre about the origin of southern society, what it is explained by the original sin of slavery. The idea is that that sin, a dark secret of the south, explains everything that went wrong in southern society.Americans, unlike British, want to forget the past as if it was a void, even if the colonies may have come from somewhere.The exception to this rule is the southern Gothic genre, most of the writers of this genre were woman and they tend to follow Poes writing as an example: darkness, decay atmosphere...In A Rose for Emily, and old lady is refusing the changes of society. The problem in he narrative technique is that the narrator disguises himself as a 1st person plural. The macabre element of the story is that Emily keeps the corpse of her boyfriend, who she was probably going to marry, for over 40 years.All the writers of this period were very connected with the films because they wrote dialogues and screen play for Hollywood. They had the chicken-egg problem in their writing, what comes first? They became popular because of the adaptations of their noels to the cinema, however, the adaptations are sometimes different from the novel in terms of exploiting certain things. Ex. Lolita by Nabokov. A rose for Emily in the surface appears to be not so difficult; it is an exception in Faulkners writing.All the writers of the Lost Generation were born in 1895/6/7 and educated around the First World War, but they were not directly connected with it.Fitzgerald emphasized the first disappointing with the American Dream. American literature became international with him, Faulkner and Hemmingway because they were much more internationally oriented in their literature.They also became pessimistic about the creation and the whole concept of America, the American Dream and the material success suddenly had flaws. They believed that America standing only by material success is immoral. The common believe until then was that America wasnt tempted by European corruption, it was purer and untainted, but when lots of Americans soldiers came to Europe and saw for themselves the European culture that believe was broken.In geographical terms, America wanted nothing to do with the colonizing countries; its what we call American isolates politically speaking. This changed when the president Wilson in the 20th century made an speech trying to convince Americans to go to war in Europe, with the excuse that the ultimate goal of USA was to make the world safe for democracy. The American Drama Tennessee Williams was a symbol of the literature of the south on account of the race problems that its significant to the rest of the world. Southern literature was read in account of that. Tony Morrison believed (a metaphor obviously) that Clinton was the first black president; all the criticism that Clinton had suffered was the symbol of the Afro-American attitude. The American Drama till the second half of the 20th century: the authors had been paid to write copies of the European plays. The role that drama has played for centuries was taken by cinema and drama loses its value and it has a reduce in audience. The last highlights of traditional drama in English are represented by Oscar Wild.Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams represent two different schools of play writing.Arthur Miller rewrote the Crucible. It was about what he believed it had happened in America when people tried to find who was responsible for the war. It was deeply fashionable.Tennessee Williams wrote Death of a salesman that represents what Gatsby started after the First World War. This time it is after the Second World War and an epitaph of what, until then, had been seen of the limitless wealth increase that Americans represented. She represented the rebirth of American Drama and was a good practitioner of dissecting the southern society and elements. Alice Walker She represents the patter involved in the Afro-American Literature. The American constitution follows more or less the British one, which its not written down. The Constitution is basically a bill of rights and amendments were given to it. The 13th amendment to the constitution made owning people illegal after the civil war was finished. The 14th amendment gave citizenship to the Afro-Americans. The 15th amendment gave them the same rights as the white majority, making them able to be elected and to vote. Even then, they were second class citizens and they were discriminated in jobs, education and housing. Just by writing down the words blacks were not given the same privileges as whites. In 1950, blacks couldnt attend the white educational system and they couldnt go to the same restrooms as white people. Some states even changed their constitutions for blacks to have difficulties voting or being elected. The southern states for example were governed by whites when they were the minority of the population because blacks werent able to vote. The political party that voted for blacks rights were the republicans and they started the war to give the blacks some accessibility. The democrats were the ones stopping blacks from voting.In 1954 a Supreme Court pronouncement made illegal to discriminate black in educational terms. Even then, there was a completely separation of races, blacks couldnt go to certain stores, restaurants of gas stations. This situation didnt change till the 80s. Alice Walker described this situation, she was Afro-American and from the first generation of blacks that were educated and went to university. Until then, American writers were self educated, they could read and write but they didnt study how to write like Walker did. We have to point that blacks went to university in the north; in the south they were discriminated.Alice Walker was an iconic figure of feminism, an Afro-American writer and an expert in using techniques from other writers in her literature.