American literature
The American literature includes the literary production of the United States and the British colonies from which they emerged. In the English-speaking world, American literature is the subject of English literary studies , less often of American studies .
In German-speaking countries, where the idea of national literature ( Herder ) prevailed in the 18th century and the philological idea ( Schlegel , Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm , Lachmann ) prevailed in the 19th century , an independent academic discipline was created for them - American Studies .
The vast majority of American literature is written in English ; this also applies to the literature of the indigenous people . The literature written in the languages of non-Anglophone immigrants. z. B. Chicano literature , is usually not examined in the context of American studies, but in the corresponding philologies . The “hyphenated literatures”, such as African-American literature , Jewish-American literature and Chinese-American literature, have developed into their own fields of research .
Photograph by Carl van Vechten , 1935.
Features, motifs, genera
It is only since the 19th century that the American has been understood as an independent national literature that differs in its essence from the English. A major reason for this "late development" was that early American literature was strongly oriented towards European models and specifically American characteristics only emerged after a few decades. American literature, especially of the 19th century, is to be seen in connection with the young democracy's need for political legitimacy, but especially with the desire to prove that it is culturally equal as a European nation. Authors such as Walt Whitman and Mark Twain emphasized their Americanness again and again and asked themselves and their compatriots what it meant to be American, and what peculiarities and contradictions this entails. The demarcation from Europe took place in particular in direct contact with the old continent. For many writers, a stay in Europe, often of several years, turned out to be a time of identity. Writers who have dealt with this topic (European theme) include Benjamin Franklin , Washington Irving , James Fenimore Cooper , Nathaniel Hawthorne and the writers of the Lost Generation who made it to Europe during and after the First World War. For Henry James , who settled permanently in England, it forms the central theme of his extensive work. The counterpart to this subject are the numerous works that deal with the experience of immigrants in America.
American writers also often grapple with the nation's "founding myths" which are a rhetorical legacy particularly of the Puritans , the Revolutionary Period , and the early Republic. These include the nation's self-image as a “city on the hill” (originally a trope of the Puritan John Winthrops ), whose example the world should enjoy, or as the new Canaan . A specifically American topos, which, following Max Weber's essay The Protestant Ethics and the 'Spirit' of Capitalism (1905), is often traced back to Puritanism, is the success myth, also known as the American Dream or Gospel of Success , i.e. the idea that Anyone in America can go far with hard and honest work (in a classic version of dishwasher to millionaire ); Examples of this are the novels Horatio Alger . On the other hand, there is a multitude of works that juxtapose the promise of a Promised Land associated with America with social reality and thus question them. According to Sacvan Bercovitch , this material is often referred to as American Jeremiad ("American Jeremiad "). Since independence in 1776, confrontation with the country's political system has also played a major role in American literature. Many writers - from Washington Irving about John Dos Passos to Gore Vidal - appealed to the " founding fathers " of the nation as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson , the First Principles to summon the nation or to face the political reality.
The view that the USA is a special case in the history of the West gave American studies an ideological framework in its beginnings. It emerged in the 1930s and 1940s as an academic discipline that was equally cultural and literary. The publication of Vernon Louis Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought (1927) can be regarded as the hour of birth of American Studies . Parrington and his successors insisted on the uniqueness of the American experience and sought to expose the characteristics of the alleged American national character - individualism , liberalism , idealism , pragmatism - also and above all in American literature. In several influential studies, Perry Miller located the origins of Americanism in New England Puritanism and its perfection in 19th century transcendentalism . In FO Matthiessens The American Renaissance (1941) the writers of American Romanticism were declared bards of the American will for freedom, RWB Lewis in The American Adam (1955) identified the idea of a certain paradisiacal innocence of the settlers of the New World as a typical American topos. In the 1960s, triggered not least by the civil rights movement and feminism , the ideological foundation of American studies and thus also the canon began to falter. The literature of previously underrepresented sections of the population - women, blacks, immigrants - has since been included on school and university reading lists.
prose
American literature came to maturity in the 19th century when traditional European literary genres such as the verse epic lost relevance and prestige and the novel became the dominant literary form. The call for the Great American Novel , the "great American novel", which is to show that the literature of the USA is on a par with that of Europe and is capable of expressing the characteristics of the nation, originates from this time .
1851 Nathaniel Hawthorne had his readers in the preface to his novel The House of the Seven Gables out that they not a novel (novel) would have the right, but rather a romance . Therefore, he allowed himself an artistic leeway in both the subject matter and the presentation that would be unforgivable in a novel . Hawthorne's distinction has been used frequently in literary studies, particularly since the 1950s, to highlight a characteristic feature of American literature. In particular compared to the English novel, which from its beginnings to this day has mostly been conceived as a social novel with a more or less realistic program, American authors attach greater importance to the imagination in order to - in Hawthorne's words - address the "truth of the human heart" Reason to come and - so the conviction of the first Americanist generation - to develop politically effective subversion potential. The American romance so is in an anti- mimetic tradition, which is located less to the plausible illusion education and instead the writing itself turns as a process of meaning operating decisions. In recent decades, the creative writing movement has contributed to the fact that authors are less and less concerned with literary models.
The short story ( short story ) has a high status in American literature since the 19th century, is it that often as all-American type of text considered. Many novelists also worked in this genre, some also wrote literary theoretical treatises on it, with Edgar Allan Poe's approach to aesthetics in particular proving to be very influential - in his essay The Philosophy of Composition , he took the position that a story must be short enough to be included in to be read in one go, so that the “unity of impression” and thus the immediate effect of the story on the reader is preserved. Short stories have been and are not only published in designated literary and cultural magazines such as Atlantic Monthly , The New Yorker or Harper's , but also in news and popular magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post and reach an audience of millions. The first edition of Ernest Hemingway's short story The Old Man and the Sea helped Life magazine to sell 5,300,000 issues in just two days in 1952. To this day, volumes of short stories reach the American bestseller lists; in Europe this is the exception.
Philosophical and political essays also benefited from the boom in the US magazine industry in the 19th century . By 1850 there were about 1,100 weekly magazines and 200 other periodical publications. As a result, this form of literature, which had found a place in daily newspapers based on the English model since the 18th century, continued to gain popularity. Early American essayists included Benjamin Franklin , Thomas Paine, and Washington Irving . The essay's highlights were marked by the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson , Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., and Henry David Thoreau . James Russell Lowell developed the literary essay and used the art form in dealing with proponents of slavery. Mark Twain was a proponent of the humorous esay. In the 20th century, George Santayana and Henry Louis Mencken should be mentioned. The Afro-American essay authors include James Baldwin and Martin Luther King .
drama
The drama played in the US long hardly matters. Theatrical performances were banned from the New England Puritans, and as late as the 19th century they were a thorn in the side of conservative morals. The first evidence of a theatrical culture in today's United States is typically a court document from 1665: The actors of an ensemble were arrested for causing public nuisance. Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island passed laws criminalizing theatrical performances after 1750, and in 1794 Timothy Dwight IV , president of Yale College , declared that going to the theater resulted in the loss of "that most precious of all treasures, the immortal soul." Theater became a popular pastime, and permanent stages were built in the larger cities in the 18th and 19th centuries. However, mostly English plays - especially Shakespeare - were given. In 1865, Abraham Lincoln was shot dead by actor John Wilkes Booth while performing the English farce Our American Cousin .
The theater in the USA was more subject to commercial constraints than in Europe, which required the plays above all to be entertaining. Numerous vaudeville ensembles toured the country - often in the wake of annual fairs . There were also numerous European theater and vaudeville troupes who discovered the American market from the second half of the 19th century. In the 20th century, quite a few European actors who would later become famous through film came to the USA this way; well-known examples are Cary Grant and Stan Laurel . But European stars of high culture such as Sarah Bernhardt also went to American theaters in the 19th century. A specifically American form of burlesque was the minstrel show , in which white actors with soot-blackened faces caricatured the life of the black population in an overtly racist manner. The theater was also used as a political medium by the abolitionists ; Adaptations of Harriet Beecher Stowes novel Uncle Toms Hütte were crowd pullers. At the end of the 19th century, New York's Broadway became the center of national theater operations and the starting point for new developments such as musicals .
In the 20th century, the rise of Hollywood cinema put an end to this theater culture, but now more and more dramatists emerged who were committed to high culture. Particular mention should be made here of Eugene O'Neill , who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936, Arthur Miller ( Death of a Salesman , 1949), and TS Eliot ( Murder in the Cathedral , 1935). Many successful pieces have also been adapted for the screen, such as Tennessee Williams ' end of the line longing . Thornton Wilders Our Little Town (1938) is shaped by Brecht's epic theater ; Today it is probably the most performed play in the USA to this day - it is particularly popular with school theater groups. After the Second World War, the living theater movement developed. The most important American representative of the absurd theater is Edward Albee ( Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, 1962). To this day, however, American theater culture has - compared to European - a niche existence. A major reason for this is that theater operations in the USA are not subsidized by the state.
Regional characteristics
The geographical and historical differences between the various parts of the country are also reflected in the literature; dialects are often reproduced in order to convey a realistic picture of everyday life in local color fiction . Many works such as Mark Twain's stories about the Mississippi or William Faulkner's southern novels are part of world literature .
A quasi-aristocratic culture based on slavery and the plantation economy developed in the southern states of the USA . Since their defeat of the southern states in the civil war , the pathos of past greatness has become a defining motif in literature: When asked why the South produced so many great writers, Walker Percy responded with the famous dictum “Because we got beat” (“Because we were beaten ”). White writers often transfigured the antebellum society of the south into a harmonious community in which all men were gentlemen , all women were ladies , and the slaves were cheerful, frugal, childlike and loyal, as in the best-selling American novel, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, to this day (1936). A more critical picture can be found in the 19th century with African-American writers like Charles W. Chesnutt , but also with white ones like George Washington Cable , Joel Chandler Harris and Kate Chopin . The ambivalent relationship between the South and its past also shaped the heyday of southern literature from around 1930, the so-called Southern Renaissance , with authors such as Caroline Gordon , Katherine Anne Porter , Allen Tate , and Robert Penn Warren , and also the gothic novel of the South, the so-called Southern Gothic , of which Edgar Allan Poe is considered to be the progenitor . It is therefore seen as a genre of its own, in which, in the words of Tennessee Williams ', a "recognition of the fundamental horror of modern experience" is expressed. It reached its peak in the works of William Faulkner ; after the Second World War, authors such as Carson McCullers , Truman Capote , James Dickey , William Styron , Harper Lee , Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor continued this tradition.
The western is a genre of its own in literature too , especially in trivial literature , but the myth of the Wild West was first invented in sophisticated works such as Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902) . More recently, authors such as Thomas Berger , Wallace Stegner , Norman Maclean , Larry McMurtry , Annie Proulx and especially Cormac McCarthy have found a more critical approach to the subject.
The Midwest often stands for provincial-backwoods small town life, which is sometimes lovingly, sometimes satirically depicted in Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919), the novels by Sinclair Lewis or in Garrison Keillor's stories about the fictional place Lake Wobegon. Often this resonates with the widespread opinion in the collective consciousness of the Americans that the Midwest is “America's Heartland” and can therefore lay claim to representativeness; America is the "most American" here.
History of American Literature
Colonial times
The first Puritans came to New England on the Mayflower in 1620 and founded the settlement of Plymouth there . Her first governor, William Bradford , recorded her fate in a History of the Plymouth Plantation , which, however, was not published until 1856. Thousands of Congregational Puritans followed these so-called " Pilgrim Fathers " from 1630 and built the Massachusetts Bay Colony around Boston . Its first governor, John Winthrop , gave a sermon before the conquest, in which he shaped the image of America as a “ city on the hill ”. The origins of the American sense of mission are therefore traced back to Winthrop and the Puritans - only partially rightly. Winthrop's History of New England was not published until 1853. Leading preachers of the first generation of Puritans continued to include Thomas Hooker , Richard Mather , Thomas Shepard, and John Cotton . They left behind a considerable number of sermons, theological treatises, and writings on New England Church history. The writings of the deviant Roger Williams on questions of religious tolerance and the separation of church and state also deserve mention. Many Puritans - including Winthrop and Shepard - kept diaries. This pronounced tendency towards introspection is related to the Calvinist concern for one's own state of grace ; the Puritans were constantly concerned with the question of whether their actions were pleasing to God. They also kept an eye out for providence in this world, especially in nature.
The first documents in American literature are travelogues and chronicles of the first settlements in Virginia and New England , diaries, sermons , theological treatises, and practical literature , but hardly any texts that were written with artistic claims. This is due in part to the asceticism of the Puritans . Worldly pleasures were frowned upon, and theater performances were long banned. The Puritans also called for an unadorned, plain style in prose , and so the conditions for the development of a literary tradition were extremely poor. On the other hand, New England had the highest literacy rate in the world in the 17th century . This was thanks to the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura , which gave Bible study a central role. The first book printed in North America was the Bay Psalm Book (1640), a metrical re-translation of the Psalter ; With over two million copies, besides the Bible, by far the most printed book of the colonial era, a primer , the New England Primer, first published in 1690 . It is at the same time a testimony to the Puritan worldview. With the first letter the student is taught the sinfulness of man; the mnemonic is "In A dams case, we sinned all."
Poetry alone could develop in New England, but it too was often - like Michael Wigglesworth's Day of Doom - conceived as religious edification literature. This Judgment Day poem, in Knittel verse , was the only book apart from the Bible that was approved in many households. The most important Puritan poets were Edward Taylor and Anne Bradstreet . Some of Bradstreet's poems were published in London in 1650 under the title The Tenth Muse Lately Jump Up in America . The title already suggests that until now the muse was hardly suspected in America. Bradstreet's poems often also deal with the joys of married life and domestic life. Taylor was based on the metaphysical poetry John Donnes .
The diary of Judge Samuel Sewall , of which the years 1674–77 and 1685–1729 have been preserved, and the report of a trip from Boston to New York written in 1704 by the businesswoman Sarah Kemble Knight (The Journal of Madam Knight) . The first originally American genre is the captivity narrative , i.e. reports on experiences of whites (mostly women) who were taken prisoner by Indians. The first, and probably best known to this day, is the account of Mary Rowlandson , who was captured with her three children in 1675. It had numerous editions up to the 19th century and is considered the first American bestseller . A particularly vivid description of the life of the Seneca Indians can be found in Mary Jemison , who was abducted during the Seven Years' War in 1758 and who later lived with the Seneca of her own free will.
The settlers of Virginia were also their own historians. John Smith , one of the founders of Jamestown , wrote A True Relation of Occurrences and Accidents in Virginia in 1608 . His later account of his alleged rescue by the Indian Pocahontas went into American folklore. In the more southern colonies, an aristocratic and, compared to New England, profane culture developed in the 17th century. Its most important chronicler was Robert Beverley with The History and Present State of Virginia . In the south satire also flourished . William Byrd provided a rather humorous version of the history of Virginia with The History of the Dividing Line (1738). Anonymous authors targeted the founders of this colony in a True and Historical Narrative of the Colony of Georgia in 1741 . George Alsop wrote about Maryland , and Ebenezer Cooke concluded his satirical epic poem The Sot-Weed Factor (1708) about this colony with the curse that God's wrath "may ravage this land where no man is faithful and no woman chaste".
The Magnalia Christi Americana (1702) by Cotton Mather are considered the culmination of Puritan history . Mather, the most learned Puritan of the third generation of settlers, published a total of more than 400 writings. After 1700, however, Puritanism had exhausted itself as a religious and intellectual force, and the New Englanders also turned increasingly to mundane things. In detailed jeremiads , the pastors lamented the decline of morals "and thus produced the most piquant prose of the time" (according to Perry Miller ). The Great Awakening represented a final riot on the New England Way . This revival movement was triggered from 1733 by the fiery sermons of Jonathan Edwards , who called for a return to Orthodox Calvinism . It peaked in 1739-40, and in 1741 Edwards preached Sinner's sermon in the Hands of an Angry God , in which he detailed the torments that await the sinner in front of his Creator. To this day, this sermon is known as the epitome of the Puritan worldview. Edwards also wrote important theological treatises and left a diary as well as an autobiographical personal narrative . From 1722-23 he wrote a total of 70 resolutions , guidelines for a godly and disciplined way of life.
A similar list of 13 virtues was written by Benjamin Franklin around the same time, but he is not religiously motivated. Franklin's maxims are rather shaped by the rationalist ideas of the Enlightenment , as is his later political career. He began his journalistic and literary career in Boston , where he wrote essays on political and social topics for his brother's newspaper. 1733–58 he published the Poor Richard's Almanac annually, to which he mainly contributed aphorisms , many of which went into everyday language. As the conflict between the American colonies and metropolitan England intensified, Franklin became one of the leading figures in the American independence movement. He also wrote numerous political essays and satires that were read in England as in America. His unfinished autobiography (1771–89) has been translated into numerous languages.
Independence and early republic
The war of independence and the establishment of the republic went hand in hand with a politicization of literature; many of the works created after 1776 are characterized by an exuberant patriotism . Even during their lifetime, the leading figures of the revolution such as George Washington experienced a literary apotheosis , for example in Timothy Dwight's epic epic The Conquest of Canaan (1785) or in some poems by Phillis Wheatley , the first black man whose poems were published. Dwight was part of the Hartford Wits group with Noah Webster , John Trumbull and others . This circle of intellectuals mainly wrote neoclassical poetry based on the English model, even if this form of poetry had long since gone out of fashion in England. Webster wrote an An American Dictionary of the English Language from 1806 to 28 ; Most of the differences in the spelling of American versus British English are due to his spelling reform. Philip Freneau wrote deeply patriotic odes about the revolution and the young republic, extolled the virtues of American products such as tobacco and rum, and painted a very benevolent picture of the Indians ; he was later nicknamed "poet of the American Revolution". The Letters of an American Farmer (1782) by the French emigrant Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur also praised the industriousness and prosperity of the Americans.
The early American novels follow the tradition of English sentimentalism in the footsteps of Samuel Richardson ; but they are mostly on the level of dime novels . Usually an innocent girl is at the center of the plot, who is ensnared by a more or less windy suitor. In The Power of Sympathy (1789), which is considered the first American novel ever, and which is now attributed to William Hill Brown , the courted woman is able to resist the temptation. In Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple (1791), the protagonist gives in and plunges into ruin. This seductive novel had around 200 new editions by 1900 and is probably the most widely read American book of the first half of the 19th century. The first American author who made writing a profession (but failed) was Charles Brockden Brown . From 1798–99, he wrote four horror novels in just one year due to financial difficulties : Edgar Huntly , Arthur Mervyn , Ormond and Wieland . Brown picked up on the English tradition of the Gothic Novel , but in Arthur Mervyn shifted the setting from the enchanted castles of Europe to the cities of America. Brown is regarded as a pioneer of the psychological novel and exerted a great influence on Edgar Allan Poe .
The first American writers to make a name for themselves in Europe and also to live from their books were Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper. Both were heavily influenced by Sir Walter Scott's historical novels .
In 1819 Irving published the essay and short story collection The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Ghent. , in which he often transplanted European mythology onto American soil. He is now often considered the founder of the American short story ( short story called). However, his romanticizing depictions of European and American country life seem trivial today; only the short stories Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow are still known to a wide audience today. Irving also wrote monumental biographies about his namesake George Washington and about Christopher Columbus .
Cooper wrote the first nautical and espionage novels in American literature, but is best known today for his five “ leather stockings ” novels (1823–1841). These historical novels deal with life on the frontier , the border between the “civilized” world of white settlers and the “wilderness” inhabited by Indians. Like Irving, Cooper often portrayed the Indians of North America as “noble savages” in the sense of Rousseau . His literary merit has often been questioned (Mark Twain's essay The Literary Offenses of Fenimore Cooper (1895) became famous ). His characters are mostly stereotypical, the plot predictable, the style often clumsy. Nevertheless, Cooper dealt in his novels with topics that are of particular relevance to American culture: the opening up of the West, the driving back of the Native Americans and the dubious morality of this endeavor. With his late work, Cooper fell out with his audience, as he developed an increasingly conservative-aristocratic attitude towards American democracy, which he saw more and more as mob rule.
The early work of William Cullen Bryant , which clearly shows the influence of Wordsworth , stands on the threshold of Romanticism . In poems such as To a Waterfowl and Thanatopsis (1817) he extolled the grandeur of American nature; With The Ages (1821) he wrote an ambitious didactic poem about the advancement of mankind.
romance
American Romanticism reached its peak a good three decades after the European one had passed, but it produced some works that are now world literature . According to a standard work by the literary scholar FO Matthiesen , it is often referred to as the American Renaissance . A distinction is usually made between the “light” romanticism of the transcendentalists such as Emerson and Thoreau from the “dark” romanticism, to which Poe, Hawthorne and Melville are counted.
A milestone of this era was the publication of Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay collection Nature in 1836 , in which he described nature as the most important source of spirituality and thus of knowledge. Emerson, a former Unitarian clergyman, gathered a circle of like-minded people in Concord, Massachusetts . This Transcendentalist Club gave its name to transcendentalism , which subsequently exerted a great influence on American intellectual history as a philosophical, religious and literary movement. He referred to Kant's transcendental philosophy , which he made subservient to a pantheistic enthusiasm and combined with Far Eastern and Indian philosophy, and partly Gnostic elements. Emerson and his successors viewed nature as divine, emphasizing the creative process in the natural, and assuming that there is a correspondence between the universe and the individual soul. The divine, a world soul , permeates all reality, and a mystical knowledge of the beauty and truth of nature lead to the fulfillment of human destiny. The intuition is more important than the understanding, in the process of writing the creative power of the poet has a quasi divine meaning, since with the help of his imagination he can penetrate reality and transcend it harmoniously. Such a process can transform the individual and takes place apart from general truths and traditional traditions. So Emerson also rejected organized religion in favor of an intuitive spirituality. He expressed his ideas in a few poems, but his essays are of lasting importance. His lecture The American Scholar (1837) was often referred to as the "cultural declaration of independence" of the USA.
Henry David Thoreau borrowed money from Emerson in 1845 to live in a log cabin on Walden Pond near Concord for two years. He lived by no means, as is often assumed, completely self-sufficient and isolated from the outside world - a large part of Walden (1854) deals with Thoreau's dealings with his neighbors and his commercial transactions. Thoreau's goal was to "live consciously and only face the essential facts of life". Thoreau's descriptions of nature often suggest Emerson's enthusiasm, but his remarks on ethics, politics and above all his meticulous bookkeeping make Walden a very personal document that appears down-to-earth and utopian at the same time. The pursuit of an alternative way of life made it a cult book of the hippie movement much later, in the 1960s . Thoreau's political essay Civil Disobedience (1849) influenced Mahatma Gandhi's and Martin Luther King's strategies of nonviolent resistance, among others ; also became an icon of the environmental movement in the 20th century due to the admiration he felt for nature .
Emerson repeatedly demanded that poetry should break away from European models in order to do justice to America's peculiarities. He saw his wish fulfilled when Walt Whitman sent him a copy of his volume of poetry Leaves of Grass (1855), on which Whitman was to work until his death in 1890. Whitman dispensed with meter and rhymes and thus paved the way for free verse not only in American poetry. The French symbolists (above all Arthur Rimbaud ) were influenced by him, as were the poets of American modernism. Whitman's elegies, often catalog-like, on the cities, forests and people of the USA make him the ultimate American poet for many. He also often placed the physicality of the human being and the sensory world in the foreground and was the first well-known poet to openly address sexuality - including his own homosexuality. In Whitman's work, Emerson's rather spiritual notion of the pervasiveness of the world turned into a decidedly worldly holism.
Nathaniel Hawthorne's novels and short stories, on the other hand, are characterized by a deep epistemological and metaphysical skepticism . His topics were often the dark side of the soul and society, i.e. sin, guilt, punishment and intolerance. In his collection of short stories, Twice-Told Tales (1836), he already showed a preference for dark and often occult symbolism in the tradition of Charles Brockden Brown's horror novels . In his novel The Scarlet Letter , he dealt with the strict society of his Puritan ancestors. He could not gain much from the enthusiasm of the transcendentalists. In 1841 he spent some time at Brook Farm , a transcendentalist utopian commune, and recorded the failure of this experiment in the key novel The Blithedale Masquerade . Like Emerson, Hawthorne was canonized during his lifetime as one of the founders of an independent American national literature.
Hawthorne was the model of Herman Melville ; the novel Moby Dick (1851) is dedicated to him. Melville had previously published South Seas and seafaring novels with some success. Moby Dick , a novel about whaling , was ruthlessly panned by literary critics for religious reasons as well, because Melville showed in this extremely complex book a preference for the occult and the satanic, for the "blackness of darkness". The novel is at the same time an encyclopedic inventory of the economic, social and scientific aspects of whaling and a far-reaching reflection on the fundamental questions of human existence, on the nature of good and evil, the limitations of human knowledge and other religious and metaphysical topics. The diction and form of the novel are adapted to this circumstance and correspondingly diverse, a mosaic of various genres. It was not until the beginning of the 20th century that the taste of the times was ripe for the book, and the forgotten Melville became one of the godfathers of modernity. After the failure of Moby Dick , Melville tried in vain to restore his reputation, but the quality of his late work, especially shorter prose pieces such as Billy Budd and Bartleby the Writer , was not recognized until long after his death.
Emily Dickinson lived her life in isolation and unnoticed by the New England literary scene in the small village of Amherst, Massachusetts, and wrote a total of 1,775 poems, only seven of which were printed during her lifetime. It was only after 1950 that they were discovered and made known to a wide public. Her precise and often strangely modern lyrics express a deep spirituality, but often sheer existential despair.
Edgar Allan Poe was suspicious of the New England transcendentalists; However, this was entirely mutual. His dark short stories had a lasting influence on the development of fantastic and horror literature , with The Double Murder on Rue Morgue he invented the modern detective story . The science fiction -literature owes him decisive impulses, is it still in his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is a realistic presented South Pole trip and other stories about progress in the balloon ride or the reawakening of mummies by Volt Ash columns . Poe succeeded in placing stories as reports in newspapers as a journalistic scoop , which contributed to the fact that, in contrast to the romantic, fantastic literature, he not only fabulated, but combined the latest knowledge of the natural sciences with narrative ideas. Today's literary critics judge Poe's services to poetry ambiguously. Some of his poetic works are more skillful than artistically successful, on the other hand he succeeded - also by means of a formulated theory of poetry ( The Philosophy of Composition , The Poetic Principle ) - to develop the lyric beyond Romanticism and Realism into the field of symbolist and phonetic language art. Some of his poems like Der Rabe and Annabel Lee are among the most cited and parodied not only in American literature. After his early and tragic death (1849), Poe fell into disrepute, if not completely forgotten. In France, however, his works enjoyed great popularity in translations by Baudelaire and Verlaine , and it was only through this detour that Poe's genius was finally recognized in the USA.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, Hawthorne and Emerson were placed alongside authors in the canon of American literature whose prestige has now faded as their works appeared too conventional to later critics: Oliver Wendell Holmes , Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell . They belonged to the " Brahmins of Boston " (Boston Brahmins) , so (with the exception of Longfellows) came from the most distinguished families of Boston and were all closely associated with Harvard University . Longfellow was the first professor of modern languages there and was succeeded in this capacity by Lowell in 1855. The historians Francis Parkman , William H. Prescott and J. Lothrop Motley are also counted among the literary history of the USA because of the stylistic virtuosity and narrative character of their works. Prescott wrote extensive works on the history of Spain and its colonies in the New World and took on the history of the Netherlands in no less epic breadth; Parkman is famous for his work on the colonial history of the United States and Canada.
Finally, it should be noted that trivial literature dominated the book market throughout the 19th century, which led Hawthorne to famously claim that America was left entirely to a "damned mob of scrawling women." Its outstanding representatives are Susan Warner ( The Wide, Wide World , 1850), Fanny Fern ( Ruth Hall , 1854), EDEN Southworth ( The Hidden Hand , 1859) and Augusta Jane Evans Wilson ( St. Elmo , 1866). But men also wrote sensationalist literature; George Lippard's horror novel The Quaker City or the Monks of Monk Hall (1845) should be mentioned here. The numerous novels of the abstinence movement , in which the consequences of alcohol consumption are described in an often drastic manner, must also be counted as trivial literature .
Abolitionism and Civil War
In the 19th century the conflict between northern and southern states over the legality of slavery intensified . It was also carried out through literary means. Quakers played an important role in the abolitionism movement , such as the traveling preacher John Woolman as early as the 18th century. His autobiography is also remarkable in literary terms. John Greenleaf Whittier , also a Quaker, condemned the exploitation of the slaves primarily as a journalist, but also in poems that were often reprinted such as Ichabod . Abolitionism also produced a considerable body of mostly badly melodramatic trivial literature, which was supposed to expose the conditions in the American South. But slave narratives , i.e. authentic reports that were written by former slaves themselves, also achieved high print runs. The autobiography of the Briton Olaudah Equianos became a bestseller as early as 1789, and Frederick Douglass (1845) and Harriet Jacobs are particularly notable in the 19th century . Probably the most momentous novel in American history appeared in 1852: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin ( Uncle Tom's Cabin ) was in the north a bestseller and contributed significantly to the rise of abolitionism in.
In 1861 the civil war broke out and led to a wave of patriotism on both sides, which was also reflected in literature. Henry Timrod and James Ryder Randall rhymed for the cause of the southern states, in the north Julia Ward Howe's Battle Hymn of the Republic became a patriotic profession. One of the writers who fought as a soldier in this four year long war was Ambrose Bierce , who processed his experiences in a few short stories. Walt Whitman and Melville also wrote poetry about the carnage on the battlefield.
However, it was only in later years that the war became a central issue and trauma, particularly in southern literature. Outstanding books on the subject include Stephen Crane's The Medal of Red Bravery (1895), Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novels (1930s), Stephen Vincent Benét's John Brown's Body (1928) and, last but not least, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1936), the best-selling American novel of all time.
realism
After the Civil War, a socially critical tone became formative in American literature. The USA was a country in upheaval. Mass immigration, industrialization and urbanization fundamentally changed society. The well-read novels by Horatio Alger conjured up the “land of unlimited possibilities”, but in view of the social reality many writers of the time described the dark side of the capitalist economic system. Analogous to European literature, the years up to around 1900 are usually summarized under the epoch term realism . Of course, the entire literary production of these years cannot be subsumed under this program of realistic presentation. Probably the best-selling book of the era was the historical novel " Ben Hur ", written by the Civil War General Lew Wallace . Edward Bellamy was able to achieve similarly high editions with his utopian novel Looking Backward 2000–1887 . Modeled on Longfellows and the Victorian English poets of the time, many well-respected poets of the time wrote conventional poetry that has now been forgotten. So Emma Lazarus probably only so known because her sonnet The New Colossus (1883) on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty is engraved.
After the Civil War, New England lost its economic and literary supremacy. The focus of the literary business shifted from Boston to New York, and by the end of the century Chicago and San Francisco also had a lively literary business. Many distinguished writers came from the Midwest during this period: Mark Twain from Missouri , William Dean Howells from Ohio , Frank Norris from Chicago . A large part of the literary production is shaped regionally. The local color literature , a kind of "homeland literature", tried to convey the characteristics of the different parts of the country and often used the respective dialects.
Mark Twain's early work can also be classified in this regional literature; but it also has its place in world literature . The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) is now considered by many critics to be the first contender for the title of Great American Novel . In his descriptions of life on and on the Mississippi and in the American West, he proved to be a close observer of everyday life, but also a sharp-tongued critic of American society. According to a satire by Twain in 1873, the period from around 1870 to 1890 until today is often referred to as the Gilded Age . Twain wrote a variety of novels, travelogues, utopias and satires on a wide variety of topics. As he got older, he became increasingly pessimistic about the world. Its influence on the development of American literature is immense. William Faulkner called him "the first truly American writer".
Twain is also an example of the frontier humor , a special kind of humor that developed on the border of the settlement and whose predilection for excessive exaggeration and hearty jokes is also a characteristic of Western literature. With his descriptions of the pioneers in California, Bret Harte is just as much in this tradition as Artemus Ward and Ambrose Bierce's satires. Bierce also wrote short stories about the Civil War and some now classic ghost and horror stories.
The southern states were economically on the ground after the civil war and were also politically insignificant. In their literature, the "good old days" before the war were often nostalgically glorified, for example in the work of Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris ; at George Washington Cable and Charles W. Chesnutt society of the South will contrast sharply criticized. The poet and musician Sidney Lanier wrote rather dark odes of his native Georgia , often in dialect. Kate Chopin wrote about the Creole society of Louisiana and caused a scandal in 1899 with the novel The Awakening when she addressed adultery and mixed marriages. This novel was soon forgotten; it has only had a permanent place in the canon since the 1960s.
In feminist literary studies, Chopin is considered an icon of the women's movement , as is Charlotte Perkins Gilman , whose reality-critical utopia Herland (1915) made the androcentric constructions and imprints of reality in North American culture the subject matter and also introduced the concept of androcentrism, which is central to gender relations research today ; Unlike her well-known story The Yellow Wallpaper , published in 1899, this work also only became famous in the 1970s. The work of Louisa May Alcott also reveals feminist tendencies , whose “Little Women” books have a status in the USA that corresponds to that of the “ Nesthäkchen ” series by Else Ury in German-speaking countries. Sarah Orne Jewett wrote some humorous novels about New England society around the turn of the century.
The father of bourgeois realism as a literary movement is considered to be William Dean Howells , who was based on European models such as Ibsen and Tolstoy . In numerous novels, short stories and dramas he dealt primarily with the life of the American middle class, but also showed tensions between the social classes in his most famous novel "The Rise of Silas Lapham" . Howells soon became the godfather of the New York literary scene.
In Henry James' work the European theme , the antagonism between the “old world” Europe with its long cultural tradition and the naivety of the “new world” America often plays a central role. Since he settled in England in 1875, English literature often claims him for itself. His novels are characterized by the careful description of the inner workings of his characters, especially his female figures ( Portrait of a lady 1881). This psychological realism exerted great influence on writers of modernity, about the technique of " stream of consciousness " ( stream of consciousness , the term coined his brother William James ). James' assertion that it took an "old civilization" to set the novelist's creative power in motion contradicted the emancipation of American literature that was propagated at the time, and so he had to fend off some hostility. But the immense, albeit often tiring, precision of his style and the lack of action in his works earned him a lot of ridicule.
Like James, Edith Wharton preferred to write about the upper classes of society, especially the upper ten thousand New Yorks, from which she herself came. In her work, however, their social conventions are often exposed as hypocritical in a mocking tone; suppressed sexuality is also subtly addressed. Henry Adams could boast of even more distinguished ancestors: he was the direct descendant of two American presidents, John Adams and John Quincy Adams . His own failure, both politically and personally, led to a deeply pessimistic worldview, which he expanded from the social framework to cosmic dimensions in his autobiography The Education of Henry Adams (1907).
naturalism
As in European literature, realism radicalized in representation as well as in political terms and thus passed into naturalism . The mass misery in the cities now became the dominant theme of literature, with all its dark sides: the breakdown of families and marriages, alcoholism, crime and prostitution. A worldview shaped by social Darwinism now showed humans as instinctual beings, society as a constant struggle between individuals. If this thesis served many industrialists as a justification for capitalism, a certain nostalgia for humanistic values can be felt in many naturalistic writers. Her works combined with the call for social reforms, which was reflected in politics in the progressivism of Theodore Roosevelt , but also in a more radical form in the growing socialism .
Stephen Crane's main theme was the war: as a war correspondent he delivered reports from the Spanish-American war , his novel The Red Badge of Courage (1895) questions the military concept of honor against the background of the American Civil War. Jack London traveled the South Seas as an adventurer and moved to Alaska during the Klondike Gold Rush . His experiences flowed into novels such as The Sea Wolf , Call of the Wilderness and Wolfsblut , in which he thematized the creature of man in the struggle for survival in nature; in King Alcohol he also took on the misery of the urban proletariat . He put his late work in the service of socialist ideas. Like London, Frank Norris belonged to San Francisco's radical literary scene. His novels, inspired by the classical naturalism of Zola, also deal with the hard life in California, the supposed promised land. Greed for Gold (1899) is about the vile murder of a dentist of his wife, The Octopus (1901) is about the struggle of Californian wheat farmers against the injustices of nature and capitalism. American naturalism was probably also weakened in its development by the early death of its protagonists: none of the three named was older than forty years.
At the turn of the century, social reformers who brought the often catastrophic living conditions of the lower classes into public awareness were referred to as Muckraker (roughly “someone who digs in the dirt”) . Jacob Riis ' How the Other Half Lives is one of the groundbreaking works in investigative journalism. Upton Sinclair uncovered in The Swamp (1906) the hygienic abuses in the slaughterhouses in Chicago, but also the exploitation of the workers. The publication of the novel led to the adoption of a new hygiene ordinance for meat processing that same year.
Theodore Dreiser's sister Carrie (1901) deals with the moral decline and social rise of a peasant girl who ends up in Chicago. While this novel remained almost unresponsive at the time, Dreiser's later socialist-toned works ( An American Tragedy , 1925) had a great influence on the neonaturalist prose of the 1930s, for example on Erskine Caldwell , John Steinbeck and James T. Farrell .
The modern
The Modern began in American literature in poetry and was in its beginnings a movement in exile. Gertrude Stein had settled in Paris in 1902, Ezra Pound , HD and TS Eliot went to London before the First World War, and numerous writers and poets would follow them across the Atlantic in the next few years ( Conrad Aiken , Djuna Barnes , F. Scott Fitzgerald , Ernest Hemingway ). In the salons of Paris and London, this lost youth ( Lost Generation - G. Stein) found what they missed in the USA: an experimental literary avant-garde. The development of American and European modernist poetry during this period is closely linked, which is also reflected in the biographies of its protagonists: TS Eliot became a British citizen in 1927, the English poet WH Auden became an American in 1946. Some exiles (Eliot) stayed in Europe until their death or did not return until after World War II (Stein, Pound); however, most returned home after seeing the peak of the movement. Malcolm Cowley recorded her disillusionment in 1934 in Exile's Return .
Other writers could not warm themselves to European culture and saw their task in negotiating specifically American topics, often in typical American diction. In poetry in particular, a distinction is made between the cosmopolitans Stein, Pound and Eliot and “native plants” such as William Carlos Williams or Hart Crane . New York became the center of modernity in the USA , in literature as well as in the visual arts. The beginning of the modern age is often dated here to the year 1913, when the art exhibition Armory Show opened its doors. In New York, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz was initially the godfather of the avant-garde, Dorothy Parker and F. Scott Fitzgerald became chroniclers of the "Roaring Twenties" and the Jazz Age , and John Dos Passos wrote Manhattan Transfer, the most famous urban novel in American literature.
Especially after the First World War , modern literature was shaped by a cultural pessimism that was sometimes nostalgic, sometimes fatalistic. Fitzgerald wrote in his first novel This Side of Paradise (1920) that his generation had come to the realization that "all gods are dead, all wars fought, all beliefs destroyed" . However, literature also became increasingly political in the 1920s and 1930s as the conflict between conservative and progressive forces in society intensified. Henry. L. Mencken wrote smug comments as reporter on the Scopes process ; When the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in 1927 , John Dos Passos , Langston Hughes and Edna St. Vincent Millay, among others, kept vigil in front of the prison gates. Many writers turned to socialism and published in left-wing papers such as New Masses and Partisan Review . The "proletarian literature" reached with works such as Dos Passos' USA trilogy (1930-36) and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939) peaked after the Great Depression ; after the Moscow trials and the German-Soviet non-aggression pact , many authors turned their backs on socialism.
Modern poets tried to free themselves from formal constraints. Traditional forms of poetry have often been abandoned in favor of free verse. Experiments with new techniques such as montage or visual poetry corresponded to developments in music ( atonality ) and visual arts ( cubism ) of the time. The subject, and thus the lyrical ego, often gave way to a babble of voices of different personae behind which the poet hid himself. The turn to language is formative; it reflects the linguistic turn in philosophy. Pound advised budding poets to “buy a dictionary to learn the meaning of the words” and set about clearing the English language of historical and ideological baggage. William Carlos Williams defined a poem as a "machine built of words" . The linguistic aestheticism of the modernist poets deliberately refused to attempt simple or even any attempt at interpretation; Stein's saying "A rose is a rose is a rose" also became famous .
In literary theory, New Criticism developed analogously to this poetics . It was directed against academic literary criticism, which was often limited to historical, philological and biographical details of the poetry or the poet, and against the assumption that every poem had a “prose meaning” or even a moral that was visible in the act of interpretation must be done. Instead, they insisted on the importance of symbolic language as a means of knowledge, to - in the words of Cleanth Brooks - show "what the poem says as a poem" .
The main exponents of New Criticism were John Crowe Ransom , Allen Tate and Cleanth Brooks , all of whom had come together around 1920 at Vanderbilt University in Nashville . At the beginning of their careers they founded the poets' association of the Fugitives . Behind their thoroughly modern poetry, however, was an extremely conservative view of the world, which they announced to the nation in 1930 in the manifesto I'll Take My Stand . The twelve authors of the pamphlet and their successors came to be known as the Southern Agrarians ; they postulated the ideal of an organic society anchored in the local clod. They still saw this as a given in the southern states, even if threatened by industrialization and urbanization. The agrarians initially found many supporters, but fell into disrepute when some members of the group allied with the fascist Seward Collins ' movement . Tate, Ransom and Brooks, however, did not want to turn to this radicalization and instead devoted themselves to literary criticism and didactics. The textbook Understanding Poetry (1939) written by Brooks and Robert Penn Warren was the predominant textbook at American colleges until the 1970s ; and so they soon ensured that modernism was canonized as the new American classic .
In Eliot and Pound, too, modernity appears as a double-edged sword. Art appeared to them as the last refuge of order and humanistic values in a chaotic world. From this attitude, however, a partly arrogant elitism followed. In later years, the dark side of modernity became evident among them too: Eliot attracted attention through anti-Semitic remarks; Pound moved to Italy, defended Italian fascism during the war in radio addresses to the American troops and was charged with treason after the war. With the famous battle cry "Make it New!", Pound became the leading figure of the English-speaking modern age. First he brought Imagism , then Vorticism into being, but since 1915 he has mainly worked on his monumental work “ The Cantos ” . These 117 chants negotiate a vast encyclopedic abundance of topics and literary models, often at the limit of comprehensibility or even in Chinese characters, from Confucianism to Thomas Jefferson to Mussolini and thus wrote a comprehensive, albeit very idiosyncratic, version of world history. Even if Pound wrote to the Cantos until his death in 1972 , they remained unfinished. Eliot did not return to the USA either. He took British citizenship, converted to Anglicanism, and shed his once-strong American accent himself. In 1922 he published what is probably the most well-known poem of the English-language modernism: The Waste Land ( Das wüsten Land ) barely reveals a narrative context, but is peppered with numerous quotations and fragments of literary history from Homer to Oswald Spengler , which Eliot in listed and partly explained in an appendix to the poem. The desert land is a sobering commentary on the state of civilization, in which a longing for spiritual certainties is expressed, which no longer seem possible in a rationalized world. The Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats , which was more of a joke , turned out to be more suitable for the masses and formed the template for Andrew Lloyd Webber's Musical Cats . Eliot was also able to celebrate successes later as a playwright.
Gertrude Stein , who had published a relatively conventional prose experiment with Three Lives in 1909, also turned to poetry under Pound's influence. Her poems often resemble sound poems , so they are often more committed to the sound than the meaning. Her model was the painting of Cézanne and the increasingly abstract works of her friend Picasso . Pound's temporary companion Hilda Doolittle, who only published under her initials HD , took on classic themes such as war and violence from a female, sometimes feminist perspective in her poetry. Amy Lowell , a wealthy girl, was also inspired by Pound. Her style was quite idiosyncratic, so Pound invented the term "amygism" especially for him.
William Carlos Williams sought to succeed Walt Whitman in writing a “democratic”, ie accessible, but nevertheless modern poetry. He was not drawn to Europe and settled in New Jersey, where he practiced as a doctor until his death. Everyday life in the small town of Rutherford was the raw material for his poems, from miniatures to the five-volume cycle "Paterson". Also, Hart Crane took on American themes. Like Eliot, he was prone to academic obscurantism, but maintained a strict formalism. In the epic poem "The Bridge" (1930), the Brooklyn Bridge is the central metaphor for the mystical as well as the profane aspects of America. EE Cummings experimented with concrete poetry and language games that often bordered on nonsense , but also wrote “Der uneheure Raum” (1922) , one of the most important novels about the experience of the First World War.
Wallace Stevens ' poetry revolves around the possibility of secular transcendence: the search for direct experience in a world forsaken by the gods. In the painting of Impressionism and the literary symbolism (literature) of European character, he sees opportunities to expand the perceptible reality of man by questioning the given through the imagination. Like Stevens, Robert Frost was also in the tradition of Romanticism with his poems about his New England homeland. Of all the poets mentioned, he is probably the most accessible, so that he was celebrated as the nation's poet laureate even during his lifetime . So he had the honor of reciting his poem "The Gift Outright" for the inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1961 .
Carl Sandburg's work appears primeval American, occasionally even folkloric ; a large part of it deals with life in Chicago. The poetry of Stephen Vincent Benét , who wrote verses about the civil war ( John Brown's Body , 1928) and the western expansion of the USA ( Western Star , 1943), also appears more conventional . Both works received a Pulitzer Prize . Mention may also Don Marquis ' poems about a sealing cockroach and an aging cat lady, archy and Mehitabel , which appeared in various magazines from the 1916th
Modern prose is also shaped by linguistic experiments. The concise style of Ernest Hemingway represents one extreme, another the rampant sentences of William Faulkner . Hemingway's sentences are short, the vocabulary simple and “cleaned” of abstract and emotional expressions. In old age he described his minimalist technique as the “iceberg principle”: “I always try to write according to the iceberg principle. Seven eighths of them are under water, only one eighth is visible. Anything you eliminate only makes the iceberg stronger. It's all down to the part that remains invisible. ”Faulkner, on the other hand, said he was driven by the urge to“ put all of human history into one sentence, ”and one sentence in his short story The Bear (1942) reaches more than 1800 Words. His novels appear fragmented by frequent changes in narrative perspective, often interrupted by dreamlike stream-of-consciousness passages, so that the reader has to form an overall picture from many fragments. In John Dos Passos ' USA trilogy, conventional prose alternates with streams of consciousness and montages of newspaper articles, advertisements and other found objects .
Hemingway is at least as known for his eventful life as for his work. His fondness for beautiful women, bullfighting, deep sea fishing and big game hunting, his participation in the First World War, later in the Spanish Civil War, and ultimately his suicide made him an almost mythical figure. His experiences in wars and traveling also provided him with the material for his novels and short stories. Despite their disillusionment, Hemingway's characters embody a downright macho -looking ideal of masculinity, in which concepts such as honor or daring play a major role. Hemingway's fixation on death is formative; He once summed up both topics succinctly: "Death is the only slut who never leaves you" .
Faulkner's fame is based on the novels and short stories about the fictional Yoknapatawpha County with its capital Jefferson, which is based on Faulkner's home town of Oxford, Mississippi . Starting with Sartoris and Schall und Wahn (1929), he designed an extremely complex fictional universe, which was enriched with further details with each novel and ultimately assumed mythical dimensions. It is the fundamental questions of human existence that he addressed: the power of fate, the burden of the past, innocence and sin, redemption and damnation, sexuality, war, racism, violence and death. His work appears to be strongly influenced by the philosophy of Nietzsche and Bergson and was initially decried as disreputable and neglected in the USA, but was celebrated in France in particular by Sartre and other existentialists, in Germany by Gottfried Benn . But Faulkner probably had the greatest influence on the development of Latin American literature, especially magical realism . It was not until he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950 that Faulkner's status was also recognized in his home country.
Sherwood Anderson and Thomas Wolfe were two of Faulkner's role models. In 1919 Anderson published Winesburg, Ohio , a series of interconnected short stories about a fictional small town in the Midwest and the fate of its mostly rather grotesque residents, showing that the provinciality of American villages holds some potential for literature. During his lifetime Wolfe published two strongly autobiographical novels ( Schau heimwärts, Engel , 1929 and Von Zeit und Strom , 1935), in which he lamented his lot with a lush verbal force. The fate of Eugene Gant, the protagonist of both novels, seems all the more hopeless as he - like its author - lives with the curse of the southern states and thus seems doomed to constant failure. For all its egocentricity, Wolfe's work (three further novels were compiled from his estate) represents a comprehensive moral picture of the nation.
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F. Scott Fitzgerald's novels and short stories trace the state of the nation and the problems of human existence in the higher society of New York or in the American bohemian exile in Europe, and so he became a chronicler of the "Roaring Twenties", the Jazz Age . In The Great Gatsby (1925) he took up the American myth of success and exaggerated his tragically ending protagonist to an almost allegorical figure. Fitzgerald, sponsored by the editor Maxwell Perkins , was also a master of the psychological novel; Tender is the night (1934) describes the tragic collapse of a marriage. The novel is based on the failure of Fitzgerald's own marriage, which can also be seen in his correspondence with his wife Zelda. Another observer of the era was Dorothy Parker , who in her columns for the New Yorker commented on city life in a very pointed manner. Her cynicism, but also her despair, shape her short stories and poems.
In New York around 1920, with the Harlem Renaissance , a heyday also began for African American literature . The anthology The New Negro (1925), edited by Alan LeRoy Locke and brought together prose, poetry, plays and essays by a new generation of Afro-American authors, had a major influence on the movement . In his foreword, Locke described the emigration from the southern states to the north as “a kind of spiritual liberation” through which Afro-American art was able to develop its own identity for the first time - beyond the white models. In the art of the Harlem Renaissance, African traditions, Afro-American traditions as well as gospel and jazz play a major role, but also the ubiquitous racism of American society. White authors, above all the journalist and photographer Carl van Vechten , promoted the movement - and were influenced by black modernism. The main exponents of the Harlem Renaissance were Zora Neale Hurston , Langston Hughes , Claude McKay and Jean Toomer . Toomers Cane (1923) is a thoroughly modernist, if at times seemingly informal work that combines prose, poetry and drama.
With the global economic crisis in 1929 and the Great Depression intensified social tensions, and the labor movement and socialism gained strength in the population, but even more so in the American intelligentsia . So the 1930s went down in American literary history as the “red decade”. Also sizes of classic modernism presented their aesthetic experiments sit behind, and wrote "proletarian" novels, such as Dos Passos ( USA , 1930-36) and Hemingway ( Have and Have Not , 1937). For many, the model in program and presentation was the socialist realism of the Soviet Union, but the American counterpart is characterized by a tendency towards tragedy. The protagonists of John Steinbeck's novels ( Von Mäusen und Menschen , 1937; Frucht des Zorns , 1939 or James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan , 1932–35) fail because of the harshness of capitalism.
In many of these works an occasionally reactionary-looking pastoralism becomes noticeable, which seems to be spiritually akin to the Southern Agrarians' solidarity with clods , for example in Erskine Caldwell's novels about poor farmers in Georgia ( Die Tabakstrasse , 1932; Gottes Kleiner Acker , 1933) and also in many publications resulting from the Federal Writers' Project . This government project was launched in 1935 to provide unemployed intellectuals, including writers, historians and photographers, with a livelihood. Their work was meant to be of service to the nation, and so many of the Federal Writers were busy documenting the everyday life and social history of the United States. Like Steinbeck's novels, many of these documents express a belief in the impoverished rural population as guardians of the “true” American virtues; times may be tough, the message says, but thanks to the perseverance, ingenuity, and honesty of the American people, things will change for the better. This exaggeration of the people reached its climax in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men , a semi-documentary work by James Agee , to which Walker Evans contributed the photographs. The basic humanistic attitude of Sinclair Lewis is to be assessed similarly . In numerous socially critical, but often badly morally sour, novels he sketched a satirical picture of the American middle class ( Babbitt , 1922). In 1935 he drafted the dark vision of a US ruled by fascism, but reassured his readers with the title: This is not possible with us . Again, it is the Americans' indomitable will for freedom that prevents dictatorship. In 1930, Lewis was the first American writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature .
Nathanael West is a special case . Unlike his contemporaries, he did not write about heroic workers or the toil of small farmers, but rather observed the development of the developing affluent society with concern. The proletariat and the middle class did not appear to him as guarantors of revolutionary sincerity or democratic values, but rather as easily susceptible to totalitarian ideas, and so in his novel A Smooth Million (1934) the fascist seizure of power in the USA is quite successful . While West was almost unknown during his lifetime, today he is considered a forerunner and pioneer of postmodernism . The literary quality of Henry Roth's Call It Sleep , an impressive psychological study of a six-year-old boy in the Jewish ghetto of New York, was not rediscovered until the 1950s, when the proletarian literature of the 1930s fell into disapproval with audiences and literary criticism.
Of course, not all writers of the time dedicated themselves to the classical modernist aesthetic or a socially critical program. In 1938, to the general surprise and dismay of the American literary scene, Pearl S. Buck received the Nobel Prize for Literature. It had mainly appeared in rather lengthy novels about the Far East ( Die gute Erde , 1931). Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind was published in 1936 and soon became the best-selling novel, and the film adaptation in 1939 is still the most successful film of all time. Once ridiculed as trivial literature, Mitchell's epic about the splendor and decline of the old South is increasingly being taken seriously in literary studies. Ayn Rand fared differently, using her novels, which have sold millions of copies, as the vehicle for her philosophy of "objectivism" (which ultimately provides a justification for rampant capitalism); but a loyal following has gathered around her work to this day.
World War II and the post-war period
After the Second World War , a large number of anti-war novels and stories from former GIs appeared . For many of them, this marked the beginning of their writing careers, such as Norman Mailer ( The Naked and the Dead , 1948) and Gore Vidal ( Williwaw , 1946), James Jones ( Damned For All Eternity ) and Herman Wouk ( The Caine was hers Destiny , 1951).
Mailer and Vidal were two of the country's most politically active intellectuals for decades. Mailer ran unsuccessfully for New York mayor's office in 1969 and wrote manifestos against the Vietnam and, more recently, the Iraq war . He processed his involvement in the anti-war movement in 1968 in the semi-fictional novel Heere aus der Nacht , in which he himself appears as a fictional character and for which he specially invented “faction” (neologism from fact and fiction ) as a new genre of literature. So it is not surprising that he is often accused of narcissism, pathetic moralizing and a desire for recognition. Mailer is not only an important chronicler and critic of the country's political, but also popular culture . He wrote biographies about Marilyn Monroe and Lee Harvey Oswald , a report about the Rumble in the Jungle and a factual novel about a murderer and his execution ( Merciless , 1979). Since the 1980s he has mainly written monumental historical novels. Vidal comes from a traditional family of politicians, founded his own Left Party in 1970 and ran unsuccessfully for the Senate in 1982 for the Democrats. His literary work is as diverse as Mailer's: In 1948 he caused a scandal with Closed Circle , one of the first gay American novels; In 1968 he took up the problem of transsexuality in Myra Breckinridge . There are also numerous essays, satires and historical novels, in particular a multi-volume cycle on the political America of the 19th century.
Henry Miller shaped a negative attitude towards his homeland; The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945) is the title of one of his books and also his nickname for the USA. With the Tropic of Cancer (1934) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939) he quickly gained a reputation as a scandal writer. Miller, like Thomas Wolfe a compulsive egoist, unabashedly described his sexual escapades in self-chosen exile in Paris. In the US, these works did not appear until the 1960s and resulted in a number of lawsuits. Like the trilogy Nexus , Plexus , Sexus (1948–60), they are not only interesting from a pornographic point of view, but also as a spiritual biography and evidence of Miller's mystical inclinations. Even Paul Bowles went into self-imposed exile. He settled in Tangier , Morocco in 1947 . His first novel Heaven over the Desert (1948) was shaped by the French existential philosophy , which otherwise hardly left an impression in the USA. His characters are often uprooted Americans who perish from their inner turmoil and the unfulfilled search for certainties. Another main motive for Bowles is the cultural contrast between Orient and Occident; Arabic influences also shape his numerous musical compositions.
Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison belonged to the generation of African-American writers who followed the Harlem Renaissance and found models in it, but whose optimism had given way to resignation. Her topic was the problem of black identity in the face of the ubiquitous racism of American society. The protagonists of Wright's Native Son (1940) and Ellison's The Invisible Man (1951), long recognized as central works not only in Afro-American literature , both end tragically: the former is executed for killing a white woman, while the latter takes refuge from society to a basement where he listens to jazz records, gets drunk and complains about his lot. James Baldwin saw excluded from society in two ways, as black and as homosexual, and so he sought refuge in French exile. Giovanni's room sparked a scandal in 1956 with its gay theme. After his return he became in contrast to Wright and Ellison with the civil rights movement also politically active; so he participated in 1963 Martin Luther King's March on Washington .
Beat generation and counterculture
In the late 1940s, a literary bohème formed around Allen Ginsberg , Jack Kerouac , Gregory Corso and William S. Burroughs in New York, which a little later became known as the Beat Generation . Its members cultivated a restless and hedonistic way of life, turned to the harder playing styles of jazz such as bebop , indulged in drug use and free love and were inspired by Far Eastern philosophy and mystical literature. Veterans like Kenneth Rexroth and young poets like Gary Snyder soon swam in the wake of this fashion in San Francisco . The center of the San Francisco Renaissance was the North Beach district with the City Lights bookstore founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1953 . The cultural influence of the beat poets is evident in the mocking beatnik with which the nonconformist youth of the late 1950s and early 1960s were branded.
Ginsberg's poem Howl (The Howl ) from 1955 is the most eloquent expression of the disillusionment of his generation, but was also the subject of several court cases because of its freedom of movement. With Kaddish , he followed up this broadside against American sensitivities in a very personal lament over the death of his mother. Ginsberg's poems are in their free form, radical individualism and visionary urge in Whitman's elegiac tradition, but are at the same time ironic, desperate comments on the state of modern American society. In the 1960s, when the Beat Generation was already history, he became a symbol of the new counterculture of the hippies , was involved in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movement, and alongside the "drug professor" Timothy Leary extolled the therapeutic effect of psychedelic drugs and so repeatedly came into conflict with the state.
Similarly controversial are the life and work of Ginsberg's friend and temporary lover William S. Burroughs . After years of heroin addiction, Burroughs put the hallucinations and associations he had experienced while intoxicated and withdrawn on paper; Ginsberg edited and arranged the sketches for the novel Naked Lunch . This work was to become the subject of the last great censorship process in American literature. It was initially only published in France by Olympia Press in 1959 . The American edition of 1962 (at Grove) was banned in many places and only released for publication in 1966. Aside from their pornographic quality, Naked Lunch and Burroughs' later works such as the Nova Trilogy captivate as acrid satires on the moral condition of the nation. Burroughs also explored the limits of representation and narration with formal and linguistic experiments and thus exerted a considerable influence on later postmodernism. For example, using the cut-up technique that he invented with Brion Gysin , he cut up pages of text and rearranged them at random in order to break through the chronological and causal structure of the texts, and indeed the language itself.
The works of Jack Kerouac appear narrative rather conventional and more easily accessible , in which formal experiments such as automatic writing appear, but which are characterized by a rather simple, casual tone and linguistic immediacy. His most tester novel On the Road (dt. On the way ) is based on cooperation with Neal Cassady undertaken roadtrips and describes an aimless journey of two young men across the United States, on the run from constraints and looking for entertaining sensual pleasure and spiritual fulfillment as an alternative to the American reality shaped by materialism and the compulsion to conform. In the 1960s, Kerouac's vision seemed to be fulfilled as the counterculture grew into a mass movement, and Kerouac's novels became cult books among hippies.
Ken Kesey also became a figurehead of the hippie movement , who achieved worldwide success with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1962 . This novel about a psychiatric institution turned into a sinister parable about a society perceived as a totalitarian system, which only allows the individual to choose between submissive self-surrender or exclusion and punishment. Kesey also came into conflict with the state order more often, especially at the time when he toured the United States in an old school bus with the " Merry Pranksters ", a colorful group of dropouts, to show the country's youth from the country in lavish happenings to convince the liberating effect of LSD and other intoxicants. The journalist Tom Wolfe joined this caravan for some time and published his reports in 1968 in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test , one of the earliest texts of New Journalism . This new concept of writing, formulated programmatically by Wolfe in 1973, similarly to Norman Mailer's faction, mixed documentation and fiction and made literary experiments popular in journalistic writing. Wolfe made a name for himself as an astute observer of American culture with his essays, but later also with novels like Purgatory of Vanities (1987). Hunter S. Thompson took the participatory observation to extremes in his " Gonzo Journalism ": the author himself becomes the focus of the report. In Thompson's case, this led to particularly eccentric results as he, too, was driven by drug addiction and delusions. His work has enjoyed great popularity especially since the filming of his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, although it was designated as a novel but ultimately autobiographical .
Other important examples of countercultural literature were Joseph Heller : Catch-22 (1961), Anthony Burgess : A Clockwork Orange (1962), Truman Capote : In Cold Blood (1965), Kurt Vonnegut : Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Philip Roth : Portnoy's Complaint (1969), Charles Bukowski : Post Office (1971), Erica Jong : Fear of Flying (1973) and Robert M. Pirsig : Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974).
The postmodern
The epoch concept of postmodernism is even more difficult to grasp than that of modernity, as it is used and assessed differently by different critics. In the 1960s and 1970s, experimental authors such as Vladimir Nabokov , Thomas Pynchon ( The auction of No. 49 , 1966) and John Barth ( The tobacco dealer , 1960) were designated as "postmodern" in the narrower sense . These include u. a. also: Walter Abish , Donald Barthelme , Richard Brautigan , Robert Coover , Don DeLillo ( Unterwelt , 1997), Raymond Federman , William Gaddis , William Gass , John Hawkes , Ishmael Reed and Kurt Vonnegut ( Schlachthof 5 or The Children's Crusade , 1969).
Today, the entire literature production from around 1960 is often subsumed under the term postmodernism; Postmodern literature (English postmodernism ) is therefore the literature that is produced by a postmodern society (postmodernity) , regardless of its content or style.
The production of “traditional” works, stylistically trained in realism and naturalism , continued as a central creative field (and sales segment) after the 1950s. Successful novelists included Jerome D. Salinger ( The Catcher in the Rye , 1951), Ralph Ellison , Mary McCarthy , John Updike ( Married Couples , 1968), John Irving ( Garp and How He Saw the World , 1978) and Tobias Wolff . Authors such as Truman Capote , Eudora Welty , Flannery O'Connor , Walker Percy , John Kennedy Toole ( The Conspiracy of the Idiots , 1963), Harry Crews continued the tradition of local color fiction of the southern states. As playwrights, u. a. Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller .
Other authors served trivial genres ( science fiction , horror , punk , fantasy , hip-hop ) - or played with them: Kathy Acker , Ray Bradbury ( Fahrenheit 451 , 1953), Marion Zimmer Bradley , Samuel R. Delany , Philip K. Dick ( The Dark Screen , 1977), Shirley Jackson , Stephen King , Anne Rice ...
From the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, a. Marilynne Robinson ( Housekeeping , 1980; Gilead , 2004), Paul Auster , TC Boyle ( Welcome to Wellville , 1994), Michael Cunningham , Bret Easton Ellis ( American Psycho , 1991), Jeffrey Eugenides , Jonathan Safran Foer , Jonathan Franzen , Neil Gaiman ( Sandman , from 1988), Siri Hustvedt , Jonathan Lethem , Joyce Carol Oates , Cormac McCarthy ( No Land for Old Men , 2005), Jay McInerney , Garrison Keillor , Armistead Maupin , Neal Stephenson , Anne Tyler and David Foster Wallace ( Endless Fun , 1996).
The New Formalism is a trend in American poetry that emerged in the late 1970s. Its proponents advocated a resumption of metric and rhyming poetry - and continued to work with "traditional" forms in the early 21st century, including the poets Jared Carter , XJ Kennedy , Timothy Steele , Lewis P. Turco and Leo Yankevich . In clear contrast to this, authors of the Flarf deliberately write poems that do not correspond to this conventional aesthetic and often contain word material and formulations from practical texts (e.g. from Google search results).
Guy Davenport and David Markson continued the "experimental" strand of postmodernism . Through new media such as the Internet also novel methods developed collective literary creation - for example in the form of NaNoWriMo , which since 1999, every year, thousands of participants together at least 50,000 words long novels to write.
The work of Donna Tartt ( Der Distelfink , 2013) occupies a special position , who - unaffected by the sober, sober and occasionally minimalist style of other contemporary authors - writes traditional large novels with an opulent wealth of detail.
Minority literature
Jewish-American literature, which dates back to colonial times, flourished in the 20th century and a. by authors such as Arthur Miller , Saul Bellow , Bernard Malamud , Joseph Heller , Philip Roth and El Doctorow . The traditional African American literature also produced other important representatives, such as Toni Morrison , Ishmael Reed , Alice Walker and August Wilson . In addition, numerous authors appeared in the second half of the 20th century who expanded the literary spectrum to include perspectives from other cultural areas. Through the establishment of Ethnic Studies , the development of these intercultural literatures was academically supported and promoted.
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Asian-American literature, for example, experienced an upswing in the 1970s. The most important representatives of the Chinese-American literature , which in the 19th century with the Chinese Immigration emerged, including Lin Yutang , Jade Snow Wong , Frank Chin , David Henry Hwang , Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan . Other Asian-American authors include Chang-Rae Lee from South Korea, Hisaye Yamamoto and Karen Tei Yamashita of Japanese descent, and the Japanese-German-American author Kimiko Hahn .
Within Hispanics , a. the Cuban-born Anaïs Nin , Richard Fariña and Oscar Hijuelos , the Dominican-born Julia Alvarez and Junot Díaz, and the Puerto Ricans Luis Rafael Sánchez , Giannina Braschi and Rosario Ferré . Representatives of Chicano literature include a. Sandra Cisneros , Rudolfo Anaya , Luis Alberto Urrea , John Rechy , Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa and Luis Valdez . Since around 47 million people speak Spanish (at least as a second language) in the USA, about as much as there are in Spain, book imports from Mexico and Spain are also increasing.
In addition, there were other authors from numerous other countries: Khaled Hosseini from Afghanistan, Etel Adnan and Rabih Alameddine from Lebanon, the science fiction author Saladin Ahmed with Lebanese-Egyptian-Irish-Polish roots, Jhumpa Lahiri and Bharati Mukherjee from India , Gary Shteyngart , who emigrated from Soviet Russia, Chuck Palahniuk of Ukrainian descent , etc.
Native American Renaissance
In the late 1960s, descendants of the Native Americans emerged who wanted to regain their cultural heritage through literary work. In the course of this, they rediscovered texts by earlier Indian authors as well as the cultural assets of the tribes ( oral myths , rituals, etc.). In their works they sat down u. a. dealt with the colonization of the tribal areas by the European settlers and with the Wild West epoch from an Indian perspective. The “first wave” of the Native American Renaissance included authors such as N. Scott Momaday , Leslie Marmon Silko and Gerald Vizenor and James Welch . These inspired a "second wave", u. a. Louise Erdrich , Joy Harjo , nila northSun and Simon J. Ortiz .
Literary prizes
The most important literary prizes in the USA are the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize , which are awarded annually in the categories of prose, poetry and children's books , the PEN / Faulkner Award for Fiction for prose works, and the O. Henry Awards for short stories.
To date, 12 US citizens have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature :
year Award winners 1930 Sinclair Lewis 1936 Eugene O'Neill 1938 Pearl S. Buck 1948 TS Eliot 1949 William Faulkner 1954 Ernest Hemingway 1962 John Steinbeck 1976 Saul Bellow 1978 Isaac Bashevis Singer 1987 Joseph Brodsky 1993 Toni Morrison 2016 Bob Dylan
Notes: Singer was a native of Poland and wrote almost exclusively in Yiddish . Brodsky was expatriated from the Soviet Union in 1972 and received American citizenship in 1977; he wrote in Russian and English. Bellow was also a Canadian passport by birth, but lived most of his life in the United States. TS Eliot took British citizenship in 1927.
See also
literature
Lexicons
- Bernd Engler and Kurt Müller (eds.): Metzler Lexicon of American Authors , Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2000 ISBN 978-3476016546 .
- Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning (eds.), Metzler Lexicon of English-speaking authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present . Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X .
- Alpana Sharma Knippling (Ed.), New Immigrant Literatures in the United States: A Sourcebook to Our Multicultural Literary Heritage . Greenwood: Westport, 1996, ISBN 978-0313289682 .
Anthologies
- Nina Baym (Ed.): The Norton Anthology of American Literature . 7th Ed. Norton, New York 2007, ISBN 0-393-92743-1 (5 vols.)
- Eva Hesse, Heinz Ickstadt (ed.): American poetry. From Beginnings to the Present (English and American Poetry; Vol. 4). Beck, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-406-46463-7 .
- Paul Lauter (Ed.): The Heath Anthology of American Literature . 5th Ed. Heath Mifflin, Boston, Mass. 2006, ISBN 0-618-54239-6 (5 vols.)
- Franz H. Link (Ed.): American Poetry. From the 17th century to the present . (bilingual). Reclam, Ditzingen 1998, ISBN 3-15-009759-2 .
History of American Literature
- Sacvan Bercovitch (Ed.): The Cambridge History of American Literature . Cambridge University Press, New York 1994-2005, (8 vols.)
- Emory Elliott (Ed.): Columbia Literary History of the United States . Columbia UP, New York 1988, ISBN 0-231-06780-1 .
- Bernd Engler , Kurt Müller (Ed.): Metzler Lexicon of American Authors . Metzler, Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-476-01654-4 .
- Winfried Fluck : The cultural imaginary. A functional history of the American novel 1790 to 1900 . Suhrkamp, Frankfurt / M. 1997, ISBN 3-518-28879-2 .
- Hans Galinsky: History of American Colonial Literature , Vol. 1,1; 1.2 u. 2, Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1991 a. 1995.
- Heinz Ickstadt: The American Novel in the 20th Century . Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1998, ISBN 3-534-13027-8 .
- Suzanne Evertsen Lundquist: Native American Literatures: An Introduction. Continuum International Publishing Group: New York, 2004, ISBN 978-0826415998 .
- Kurt Müller: The American drama. An introduction. Verlag Schmidt, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-503-09800-3 .
- Sascha Pöhlmann: City and Street. Places of origin in American literature . transcript, Bielefeld 2018, ISBN 978-3-8376-4402-9 .
- Martin Schulze: History of American Literature . Propylaen-Verlag, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-549-05776-8 .
- Robert Spiller et al. a. (Ed.): A Literary History of the United States . 4th edition. Macmillan, New York 1974, ISBN 0-02-613210-9 .
- Hubert Zapf (ed.): American literary history . Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-476-01203-4 .
Classics of American literary studies
- Leslie Fiedler : Love and Death in the American Novel . Dalkey Archive Press, Norma, Ill. 2003, ISBN 1-56478-163-1 (reprint of 1957/60 edition)
- DH Lawrence : Studies in Classic American Literature . CUP, Cambridge, Mass. 2003, ISBN 0-521-55016-5 .
- RWB Lewis : The American Adam. Innocence, tragedy, and tradition in the nineteenth century . University Press, Chicago, Ill. 1995, ISBN 0-226-47681-2 (reprint of 1959 edition)
- Leo Marx : The Machine in the Garden. Technology and the pastoral ideal in America . University Press, Oxford 2000, ISBN 0-19-513350-1 (reprint of 1964 edition)
- FO Matthiesen : American Renaissance. Art and expression in the age of Emerson and Whitman . OUP, London 1968, ISBN 0-19-680624-0 (reprint of the London 1941 edition)
- Perry Miller : Errand into the Wilderness , Harvard UP, 1956.
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Vernon Louis Parrington : Main Currents in American Thought. An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920 . University Press, Norman, Okla. 1987 ff.
- Vol. 1 The colonial at least 1620–1800 , ISBN 0-8061-2077-0 .
- Vol. 2 The romantic revolution. 1800-1860 , ISBN 0-8061-2081-9 .
- Vol. 3 The beginnings of colonial realism in America , ISBN 0-8061-2082-7 .
- Henry Nash Smith : Virgin Land. The American West As Symbol and Myth . CUP, Cambridge, Mass. 2000, ISBN 0-674-93955-7 (reprint of the 1950 edition)
Web links
- Scripts from a lecture on American literary history at the University of Stuttgart
- PAL: Perspectives in American Literature: Brief portraits of authors, often with extensive bibliography
- Nagasaki University Link Collection; sorted chronologically and by author
- E-texts at the University of Virginia
Individual evidence
- ↑ Johannes Schütze: Twelve American Essays. Frankfurt / M., Berlin, Munich 1972, p. 3 ff.