Introduction :American literature has recorded the story of a quest ,at different times the quest has taken different forms( e.g. from the 16th

century, at times the quest was a religious pilgrimage.)

• Early Fiction• (1775-1781, the War of In

dependence)• The post revolutionary wo

rks• Washington Irving:• History of New York• Rip Van Winkle ;The lege

nd of Sleepy Hollow;• The Alhambra;• Tour on Prairies

Early Fiction

(1775-1781, the War of Independence)

The post revolutionary works

Washington Irving:History of New York

Rip Van Winkle ;The legend of Sleepy;The Alhambra;Tour on Prairies

James Fenimore CooperJames Fenimore Cooper: the Spy ;

The leather stocking Tales :

The pioneers(1823),the Last

Mohicans (1826),The Prairie(1827),

The Pathfinder(1840) and The Deer

slayer

Transcendentalists

Transcendentalism was a form of idealism ,or philosophical Romanticism,Emerson claimed that by studying and responding to nature individuals could reach a high spiritual state without formal religion.

Ralph Emerson: Nature

Henry David Thoreau:Walden

Herman Melville

Moby Dick(to profound theme such as fate ,the nature of evil ,the individual’s struggle against the universe )

It is considered an American masterpiece

Leaves of Grass(He

Power of Imagination

These writers were concentrating upon human imagination and emotion rather than the intellect

Edgar Allan Poe:The Masque of Red Death ,The Fall of the House of Usher

Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter,Twice Told Tale( rich in symbolism,his way of rebelling against the traditional New England outlook on life, explore certain moral theme such as guilt ,pride and emotional repression)

New Vision of America

• Mississippi River-The

Old-man River

.Bird-View of the Mississippi River

New Vision of America

Walt Whitman

(1818-1892) : Leaves of Grass He celebrated the American landscape ,the American people , their speech and democratic form of government .

Reform and Liberation

• Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Anti-slavery novel that galvanized political opinion across the nation ,the slavery question became a passionately debated political issue.) The ending of Civil War is the marks abolition of slavery in the United State

Regionalism

• As the civil war dimmed American optimism ,writers retreated from national theme ,they now focused on the different between the various regions of the United State rather than a dingle vision of the expanding country, this is the Regionalism movement

William Dean Howell(1837-1920) : The Luck of Roaring Camp (describing local life realistically)

Mark Twain

• Samuel Clemens _Mark Twain: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (in a imaginative way)

A New Wave

Naturalism :As the wounds of the Civil War slowly healed regional writer began to drop their narrow provincial focus,they put their eyes on the grimmer aspect of reality and a deterministic view of life , describing realistic everyday life .They Linked them with European naturalists such as French novelist Zola .The most reprehensive naturalists in the American literature are:

William Dean Howells : The Rise of Silas Laphan (1885)

Stephen Crane : Maggie ,A Girle of the Streets

Theodore Dreiser(1874-1945) Sister Carrie,The Red Badge of Courage

Upton Sinclair: The Jungle

Sister Carrie • In volume one of Dreiser's

autobiography, Dawn, he remembers scavenging along the railroad tracks for coal for the family stove; but he testifies also to the joyful sensuality of his child's feelings for life and the natural world around him.

Jack London : Call of the Wild

Henry James : The Wing of the Dove ,The Ambassador and The Golden Bowl

Edith Wharton (1862-1937): The House of Mirth, The Age of Innocence

The call of wild

• London expressed his sense that primitive urges underline all life ,reduce even humans to the level of animals

Naturalism: a style of art and literature in which where is faithful representation of real life.

(In Philosophy , theory that reject the supernatural and claims that natural causes and laws explain everything)

Sympathetic ViewKate Chopin: The Awakening(1899)

Willa Cather :O Pioneers!

Rebellious SpiritSherwood Anderson: Winesburg Ohio

O Pioneers!

O Pioneers depicts life on the sweeping plains of Midwestern Nebraska .It begins like this:

“One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away. A mist of fine snowflakes was curling and eddying about the cluster of low drab buildings huddled on the gray prai…”

Sinclair Lewis : Main Street,Gopher Prairie, Rabbit and Arrowsmith

The Modernists

The term modernism refers to the radical shift in aesthetic and cultural sensibilities evident in the art and literature of the post-World War One period. The ordered, stable and inherently meaningful world view of the nineteenth century could not, wrote T.S. Eliot, accord with "the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history."

Modernism thus marks a distinctive break with Victorian bourgeois morality; rejecting nineteenth-century optimism, they presented a profoundly pessimistic picture of a culture in disarray. This despair often results in an apparent apathy

and moral relativism.In literature, the movement is associated with the works of (among others) Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Franz Kafka and Knut Hamsun. In their attempt to throw off the aesthetic burden of the realist novel, these writers introduced a variety

of literary tactics and devices:

bourgeois morality; rejecting nineteenth-century optimism, they presented a profoundly pessimistic picture of a culture in disarray. This despair often results in an apparent apathy and moral relativism.

In literature, the movement is associated with the works of (among others) Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Franz Kafka and Knut Hamsun. In their attempt to throw off the aesthetic burden of the realist novel, these writers introduced a variety of literary tactics and devices

Modernism is often derided for abandoning the social world in favour of its narcissistic interest in language and its processes. Recognizing the failure of language to ever fully communicate meaning ("That's not it at all, that's not what I meant at all" laments Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock), the modernists generally downplayed content in favour of an investigation of form. The fragmented, non-chronological, poetic forms utilized by Eliot and Pound revolutionized poetic language.

T.S.Eliot: The Waste Land(1922)

E.E.Coming

Wallace Steven

William Carlos Williams

Lost Generation

In the aftermath of World War 1,many novelists produced a literature of disillusionment . Some lived abroad . They were as the “Lost Generation ”.The two most reprehensive writers of the Lost Generation were Hemingway and Fitzgerald

F.Scott Fitzgerald:The Great Gatsby,U.S.A.

Ernest Hemingway:The Sun also Rises(1926),A Farewell to Arms, For Whom The Bell Tolls(1940)

William Faulkner:The Sound and the Fury, Light August

THE GREAT GATSBY

• Fitzgerald’s great theme expressed poignantly, was ofyouth’s golden dreams turning to disappointment

Ernest Hemingway

• Hemingway adopted moral code exalting simple survival and the basic values of strength ,courage and honesty

Harlem Renaissance

The 1920s saw the rise of an artistic black community centered in Harlem,a black neighborhood in New York city . Magazines and newspapers dedicated to the black writing sprang up in Harlem. Black poets such as Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen wrote about what meant to be black. The Harlem Renaissance gave African-American culture prominence and an impetus to grow, for they brought a lively ,powerful music

jazz with them .

New Drama

At this time The writers borrowed ideas from European playwrights,like the modernists,they adapted the approach –symbolism,stories from classical mythology and the Bible,and drew upon the new science of psychology to explore the inner lives of people.Dramatic style was produced

O’neill: Desire Under the Elms(1924),Mourning becomes Electra(1931),The Iceman Cometh(1946,Long Day’s Journey into Night(1956))

Depression ,Realism and Escapism

The Depression caused novelist to focus on social forces (in1930).

John Steinbeck : The Grapes of Wrath

Margaret Mitchell:Gone with the Wind

Norman Mailer: The Naked and Dead

Herman Wouk: Caine Mutiny

Joseph Heller: Catch –22 (the beginning of Black Humor)

Postwar Voice and the “Beat Generation”

The new receptivity of American society to a diversity of voices incorporated black writers and black protest into the mainstream of American literature.

“Beat Generation”: The “Beat generation ”was made up of a group young writers in the 1950s based in San Francisco.The name referred simultaneously to the rhythm of Jazz music, to their sense that society was worn out,to the interest in forms of experience , through drugs,alcohol or Eastern mysticism .Alan Ginsburg’s poem Howl set for them a tone of social protest.

Richard Wright : Native Son

Ralph Ellison : Invisible Man

James Baldwin: Go Tell It on the Mountain, The Fire Next Time

(The follow writer focus on Jewish characters and social questions)

Saul Bellow : The Adventures of Augie March

Bernard Malamud : the Assistant

Philip Roth:Good-by Columbus

:

Bashevis Singer

(Playwrighters)

Tennessee Williams : The Glass Menagerie(1945),Death of Saleman

Alan Ginsberg: Howl

New American Voices

The feminist movement of the 1960-1970 fueled creative energies for many women writers ,with their poetry to reveal the pain and joy of being a woman.

Toni Morrison :Beloved,Song of Soloman

Alice Walker :The Color Purple

Maxine Hong Kingston:The Woman Warrior,China Men

Amy Tan: The Joy Luck Club

Writers awarded the Nobel Prizes for literature in America

• Sinclair Lewis

• Ernest Hemingway

• Faulkner

• O’Neil

• Toni Morrison