definition of american literature essay

American Literary Identity: Past, Present, and Future

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What is American literature and what makes it unique? Find the answer here! This American literature essay gives the definition of the term and focuses on its characteristics: history, authors, periods, and themes.

• Defining American Literature
• Themes & Style

What Makes American Literature Unique?

Works cited, american literature definition.

American literature refers to the body of written or literary works shaped in the history of the United States and its former colonies (britannica.com). Tracing back America’s history, America was once under the rule of Britain as part of the latter’s colonies therefore its literary institution is associated to the expansive tradition of English literature. However, American literature is now considered a separate course and institution because of its one of a kind American characteristics and the production of its literature.

This paper aims to present an extended definition on the meaning of the term American Literature. The paper will discuss the background of American Literature and how it has came about, the writing style of American authors and what makes the American text different and unique from other national literatures and lastly the paper will present arguments which explore the concept of American literature.

The History of American Literature

Before Columbus and other European colonizers discovered the Americans, the native peoples of the continent have no written alphabet but they expressed their artistic talents and passed on knowledge of their traditions in the form of chants, songs and spoken narratives.

Contrary to the popular Western understanding of literature that they must be principally a result of written words, scholars considered these verbal genres which include trickster tales, jokes, naming and grievance chants, and dream songs, among others as “literary” because they embody the creative and arousing retorts of the people to their Native culture (Baym, Franklin, Gura, Krupat and Levine).

When the Americas was colonized by different empires namely the Spanish, French, Portuguese, Dutch, German and English kingdoms, the primary role of writing was to pressure policy makers at these overseas colonies’ home base to rationalize actions taken without their precise consent, or bearing witness to the straight and unintentional cost of European invasion of the Americas.

Writing also documented the dreadful effects of European colonization of the Americas where the unintentional contamination of Old World diseases such as small pox, measles and the like to the Natives and the enslavement of the latter for plantation labour gave strong reactions toward from the public.

Also during the early occupation of the Americas, writing gave opportunities to people who were not born to a life of privilege but were in favour of merit, talent and effort to reshape the possibilities of their life such as Diego del Castillo and John Smith. In the 15 th century New England had a publishing edge over other colonies with Boston’s size in terms of population driven in producing Puritan literature together with the establishment of Harvard University in 1636 which operates with an independent college and printing press.

Though with these efforts the initial state of the English language supremacy was barely evident, political events eventually changed the course and made English the main language for the colonies as well as the choice in writing literature. From 1696 to 1700 the state of American literature consisted only of about 250 published works. These works were mostly about religious, security and cultural concerns of colonial life (Baym, Franklin, Gura, Krupat and Levine).

American Literature: Themes & Style

The war of 1812 which was a quarrel between the Unites States of America and the British empire because of trade restrictions (Hickey 56-58), forced recruitment of American merchant sailors into the Royal Navy, British support to American Indian tribes against American expansion (Hickey 101-104) and uphold national honour in the face of British insults (Risjord 196-210), paved way to the American’s growing aspiration to create a unique American literature and culture separate from that of the English.

The pioneers wrote humorous works about the American frontiers while some wrote romantic and nature inspired poetry which developed away from the early English origins.

Short stories which investigate earlier concealed levels of human psychology and move forward the limits of fiction towards mystery and fantasy were written. The movement of transcendentalism which was a protest to produce a state of culture and society was formed in response to the growing desire of American literary uniqueness. Through this formation radical writings towards individualism in the American character emerged.

Native American autobiographies were also developed and minority authors begun to publish fictions. Allegories and dark psychology became the focus of literary romances sated with philosophical assumptions. Dark Romanticism became popular in American writings presenting the characters as prone to sin and self destruction. “the Dark Romantics adapted images of anthropomorphized evil in the form of satan, devils, ghosts, werewolves, vampires, and ghouls” (Thompson, 6).

American literature has been developed through the various influence of Native American’s traditions before writing was introduced coupled by the influences brought about by European conquerors.

Initially American literature was composed of reports and documentations of complaints and status quo of the people in the New World. Writing and literature served as a means of influencing policy makers in developing the civilization, exploring the natural resources and understanding the traditions and cultures of the Native Americans.

Over time American literature evolved into various forms with fiction and non-fiction categories illustrating writers’ sentiments on matters concerning politics, economy, culture, social statuses using artistic imagery or factual resources. American literature further developed into its own form, growing away from its initial sphere of influence, English literature, during the 17 th century creating a unique American characteristic and promoting individualism.

It developed writers of different genres experimenting human emotions, philosophy and psychology. It also gave way to the dark romanticism subgenre which portrays human beings as individuals prone to sin and self destruction. American literature pushed the boundaries of human imagination and creativity with their constant experimentation of emotions and thoughts which can be attributed to the contemporary writers’ attitude of artistic expression and freedom.

Examining literary works from class in understanding the meaning of American literature through different literary works by early writers we can define American literature initially as a body of works chronicling the discovery and acquisition of the Native Americans in its early beginnings.

In relation to the events taking place in the American society, literature in the continent slowly evolved with time influencing its writers and readers the socio-economic norms coupled with the author’s artistic expressions during that specific time of writing. American literature can be considered a mirror of America’s history, well being and characteristic.

It is considered a part of the American culture for it details not only the history of the American people but also reflects the peoples’ creative thoughts and imaginations. American literature is the product of influences brought about by the colonizers from Europe and the subtle native traditions of the early settlers of the United States. It is also a powerful defining tool of American characteristics such as liberalism and individualism.

Baym, Nina, Franklin, Wayne, Gura, Philip, Krupat, Arnold and Levine, Robert. Norton Anthology of American Literature . 7 th ed. Boston: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007. Print.

Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. American Literature . Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., 2011. Web.

Hickey, Donald. The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict . Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989. Print.

Risjord, Norman. “1812: Conservatives, War Hawks, and the Nation’s Honor.” William And Mary Quarterly 18.2 (1961): 196-210. Print.

Thompson, Gary., ed. Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism. Washington: Washington State University Press, 1974. Print.

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IvyPanda . 2018. "American Literary Identity: Past, Present, and Future." October 31, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/defining-american-literature/.

1. IvyPanda . "American Literary Identity: Past, Present, and Future." October 31, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/defining-american-literature/.

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What, Exactly, Is American Literature?

Ilan stavans guests on the history of literature podcast with jacke wilson.

For tens of thousands of years, human beings have been using fictional devices to shape their worlds and communicate with one another. Four thousand years ago they began writing down these stories, and a great flourishing of human achievement began. We know it today as literature, a term broad enough to encompass everything from ancient epic poetry to contemporary novels. How did literature develop? What forms has it taken? And what can we learn from engaging with these works today? Hosted by Jacke Wilson, an amateur scholar with a lifelong passion for literature, The History of Literature takes a fresh look at some of the most compelling examples of creative genius the world has ever known.

America, America, America… a continent, a nation, a people, and a whole lotta books. But how does America define itself? Who defines it? Where did the idea of American exceptionalism come from? And how does literature fit into any of this? In this episode, Jacke talks to Professor Ilan Stavans about his new book, What Is American Literature? .

________________________

Subscribe now on iTunes , Spotify , Google Podcasts , Android , Stitcher , or wherever else you find your podcasts!

Ilan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College, the publisher of Restless Books, and the host of the NPR podcast “ In Contrast. ” The recipient of numerous international awards, his work, adapted into film, theatre, TV, and radio, has been translated into 20 languages.

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Herman Melville , Henry David Thoreau , Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickinson, Ernest Hemmingway, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou; this is just a tiny handful of the great names in American literature. For a relatively young nation, the breadth and diversity of literature written in the United States are remarkable. It is home to some of the most important authors in the world and has spawned literary movements that have since spread around the globe. American literature also served to tell the story of the developing nation, creating a perpetual link between American identity and the country's literature.

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What is American Literature?

American literature generally refers to literature from the United States that is written in English. This article will adhere to the aforementioned definition of American literature and briefly outline the history and trajectory of literature in the United States. However, it is important to note that some object to the term “American literature” to refer to English-language literature in the United States because the term erases literature from elsewhere in the Americas that is written in Spanish, Portuguese, French, or other languages.

History of American Literature

The history of American literature is intertwined with the history of the United States itself, and many of the following facts illustrate that relationship.

Puritan and Colonial Literature (1472-1775)

American literature began as the first English-speaking colonists settled along the eastern seaboard of the United States. The purpose of these early texts was usually to explain the process of colonization and describe the United States to future immigrants back home in Europe .

British explorer John Smith (1580-1631 — yes, the same one from Pocahontas!) is sometimes credited as the first American author for his publications that include A True Relation of Virginia (1608) and The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624). Like much literature from the colonial period, the format of these texts was non-fiction and utilitarian, focusing on the promotion of European colonization in America.

Revolutionary and Early National Literature (1775-1830)

During the American Revolution and the years of nation-building that followed, fiction writing was still uncommon in American literature. The fiction and poetry that was published remained heavily influenced by literary conventions established in Great Britain. In place of novels geared towards entertainment, writing was commonly used to further political agendas, namely the cause of independence.

Political essays emerged as one of the most important literary forms, and historical figures like Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), Samuel Adams (1722-1803), and Thomas Paine (1737-1809) produced some of the most notable texts of the era. Propaganda pamphlets to influence the colonists’ cause also became an essential literary outlet. Poetry was likewise employed in the cause of the revolution. Lyrics of popular songs, such as Yankee Doodle, were often used to convey revolutionary ideas.

Post-independence, Founding Fathers, including Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804), and James Madison (1751-1836), continued to use the political essay to convey ideas related to the construction of new government and the future of the country. These include some of the most important texts in American history, for example, the Federalist papers (1787-1788) and, of course, The Declaration of Independence.

The literature of the late 18th and early 19th century was not all political in nature, however. In 1789, William Hill Brown was credited with the publication of the first American novel, The Power of Sympathy . This period also saw some of the first texts published by both freed and enslaved Black authors, including Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773).

Why do you think American literature in the colonial and revolutionary periods was mostly non-fiction?

19th Century Romanticism (1830-1865)

During the 19th century, American literature really began to come into its own. For the first time, American authors began to consciously distinguish themselves from their European counterparts and develop a style that was considered uniquely American. Writers like John Neal (1793-1876) spearheaded this initiative by arguing that American authors should forge a new path, not relying on borrowed literary conventions from Great Britain and other European countries.

The American novel began to flourish, and the 19th century saw the emergence of many writers that we continue to read today. By the early 19th century, Romanticism , already well-established in Europe, had arrived in the United States. Although the proliferation of Romanticism could be seen as a further continuation of European literary influence, American Romantics were distinct. They maintained their sense of individualism while invoking the Romanticism of the American landscape and focusing on the novel more than their British counterparts.

Herman Melville ’s classic, Moby Dick (1851), is an example of this American Romanticism as a novel that is filled with emotion, the beauty of nature, and the struggle of the individual. Edger Allen Poe (1809-1849) was also one of American Romanticism’s more important writers. His poetry and short stories, including detective stories and gothic horror stories, influenced writers worldwide.

The works of the poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892), sometimes referred to as the father of free verse, was also published during this period, as was the poetry of Emily Dickinson (1830-1886).

The early- to mid-19th century also saw the emergence of Transcendentalism , a philosophical movement that Whitman belonged to, but also included essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) and Henry David Thoreau ’s Walden (1854), a philosophical account of the author’s solitary life on the shore of Walden Pond.

By the middle of the century, during the build-up to the Civil War, more texts were written by and about both free and enslaved African Americans. Perhaps the most important of these was Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), an anti-slavery novel written by white abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe.

19th Century Realism and Naturalism (1865-1914)

In the second half of the 19th century, Realism took hold in American literature as writers grappled with the aftermath of the Civil War and the ensuing changes to the nation. These authors sought to depict life realistically, telling the stories of real people living real lives in the United States.

Why do you think the Civil War and its aftermath might have inspired American writers to tell more realistic stories?

To achieve this, novels and short stories often focused on showing American life in specific pockets of the country. The authors used colloquial language and regional details to capture a sense of place. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name, Mark Twain (1835-1910), was one of the most influential proponents of this local-color fiction . His novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) exemplified American Realism and remain today some of the most indispensable novels in the American literary canon.

Naturalism , a deterministic form of Realism that examines the effects of environment and circumstance on its characters, followed Realism towards the end of the 19th century.

20th Century Literature

With World War I and the start of the Great Depression, American literature took a decidedly gloomy turn at the beginning of the 20th century. As Realism and Naturalism transitioned into Modernism , writers began using their texts as social critiques and commentaries.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) spoke of disillusionment with the American Dream, John Steinbeck told the story of the difficulties faced by dust bowl era migrants in The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and Harlem Renaissance writers including Langston Hughes (1902-1967) and Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) used poetry, essays, novels, and short stories to detail the African American experience in the United States.

Ernest Hemingway, who was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature, rose to prominence with the publication of novels such as The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929).

Other American writers who have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature include William Faulkner in 1949, Saul Bellow in 1976, and Toni Morrison in 1993.

The 20th century was also an important period for drama, a form that had previously received little attention in American literature. Famous examples of American drama include Tennessee Williams’ Streetcar Named Desire which premiered in 1947, closely followed by Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in 1949.

By the mid to late-20th century, American literature had become so varied that it is difficult to discuss as a unified whole. Perhaps, like the United States, American literature can be defined, not by its similarities, but rather by its diversity.

Features of American Literature

It can be difficult to generalize the features of American literature due to the breadth, variety, and diversity of American authors. However, many of the literature’s identifiable features can be linked and attributed to typical ideas of the American experience and American identity.

• Early on, American literature was characterized by its self-conscious effort to break away from literary forms established in Great Britain and other European countries.
• American authors, such as John Neal (1793-1876), were inspired to create their own literary style emphasizing the realities of American life, including the use of colloquial language and unmistakably American settings.
• A sense of individualism and celebration of the individual experience is one of the central features of American literature.
• American literature can also be characterized by its many forms of regional literature. These include Native American literature, African American literature, Chicano literature, and the literature of various diasporas.

Importance of American Literature

American literature has played a significant role in shaping the culture and identity of the United States as well as influencing the development of literature around the world . The novels, poetry, and short stories of writers such as Edger Allen Poe, Ernest Hemingway, and Mark Twain have made an enormous contribution to the existence of literature as we know it today.

Did you know that Edger Allen Poe is credited with the creation of the modern-day horror genre and detective story?

American literature was also important in developing American identity by telling the story of the nation. The literature helped the new country establish itself as independent from past literary traditions hailing from Great Britain and the rest of Europe. Literature also helped to develop the nation by articulating ideas central to national identity.

Examples of American Literature

The following are some examples of important writers in American literature:

American Literature: Novelists

• Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
• F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
• Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1906)
• William Faulkner (1897-1962)
• Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
• John Steinbeck (1902-1968)
• James Baldwin (1924-1987)
• Harper Lee (1926-2016)
• Toni Morrison (1931-2019)

American Literature: Essayists

• Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
• Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
• Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
• Malcolm X (1925-1965)
• Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968)

American Literature: Poets

• Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
• Emily Dickenson (1830-1886)
• T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
• Maya Angelou (1928-2014)

American Literature: Dramatists

• Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953)
• Tennessee Williams (1911-1983)
• Arthur Miller (1915-2005)
• Edward Albee (1928-2016).

Some of these writers, such as James Baldwin, could be placed in any of these categories as they wrote novels, essays, poems, and plays!

American Literature: Books

The following are some examples of important books in American literature:

• Moby Dick (1851) by Herman Melville
• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) by Mark Twain
• The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Sun Also Rises (1926) by Ernest Hemingway
• The Grapes of Wrath (1939) by John Steinbeck
• Native Son (1940) by Richard Wright
• Slaughterhouse-Fiv e (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut
• Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison

American Literature - Key takeaways

• Early American literature was often non-fiction, focusing instead on history, and describing the process of colonization.
• During the American Revolution and Post-Revolutionary Period, the political essay was the dominant literary format.
• The 19th century saw the formation of styles specific to American literature. The novel rose in prominence, and many important poets also became famous.
• In the middle of the 19th century, the dominant literary style shifted from Romanticism to Realism.
• Many texts from early 20th century American literature explore social commentary, critique, and disillusionment themes.
• By the end of the 20th century, American literature had developed into the highly diversified and varied body of work that we see today.

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Frequently Asked Questions about American Literature

What is American literature?

American literature is generally defined as literature from the United States or its earlier colonies that is written in English.

What are the characteristics of American literature?

Some of the characteristics of American literature include an emphasis on the importance of individuality, providing a strongly American sense of place, and embracing a diverse array of authors and styles.

How are American literature and the American identity interrelated?

Like many art forms, literature is a way for a culture to define and create its identity. It is at once a reflection of cultural identity and a way of perpetuating that identity. American literature exposes many aspects of American identity, such as an inclination towards independence and individuality. At the same time, it reinforces and constructs these qualities of American identity by solidifying and universalizing them in literature.

What is an example of American literature?

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (1876) is a classic example of American literature.

What is the importance of American literature?

American literature has generated some of the most important and influential authors worldwide who have shaped literature into what we know today. It also played an important role in the development of the United States and American identity.

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Commentary: What Is American Literature?

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Elizabeth Renker, Commentary: What Is American Literature?, American Literary History , Volume 25, Issue 1, Spring 2013, Pages 247–256, https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajs068

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My title repeats a familiar question, one posed repeatedly across the history of “American” letters. Its repetition came to signal a rhetorical point of entry into an ongoing debate. Even those who purported to answer definitively did not quell the argument. In 1935, Carl Van Doren's preface to What Is American Literature? summarized some of the by-then-routine sticking points: “Has America a literature at all? Has it a literature distinguished from all others? Is it American when it does not deal with American subjects? Is there any special attitude, style, technique, achievement in American literature? What qualities has it? What qualities should it have? Such questions assume that a literature is something abstract and general, a whole greater than its parts” (6). Accelerating professional consolidation in the mid-twentieth century produced increasing consensus among scholar-experts, emblematized in particular by F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941). That, too, proved temporary. The canon wars made the point loudly enough.

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The Essay: History and Definition

Attempts at Defining Slippery Literary Form

• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

"One damned thing after another" is how Aldous Huxley described the essay: "a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything."

As definitions go, Huxley's is no more or less exact than Francis Bacon's "dispersed meditations," Samuel Johnson's "loose sally of the mind" or Edward Hoagland's "greased pig."

Since Montaigne adopted the term "essay" in the 16th century to describe his "attempts" at self-portrayal in prose , this slippery form has resisted any sort of precise, universal definition. But that won't an attempt to define the term in this brief article.

In the broadest sense, the term "essay" can refer to just about any short piece of nonfiction  -- an editorial, feature story, critical study, even an excerpt from a book. However, literary definitions of a genre are usually a bit fussier.

One way to start is to draw a distinction between articles , which are read primarily for the information they contain, and essays, in which the pleasure of reading takes precedence over the information in the text . Although handy, this loose division points chiefly to kinds of reading rather than to kinds of texts. So here are some other ways that the essay might be defined.

Standard definitions often stress the loose structure or apparent shapelessness of the essay. Johnson, for example, called the essay "an irregular, indigested piece, not a regular and orderly performance."

True, the writings of several well-known essayists ( William Hazlitt and Ralph Waldo Emerson , for instance, after the fashion of Montaigne) can be recognized by the casual nature of their explorations -- or "ramblings." But that's not to say that anything goes. Each of these essayists follows certain organizing principles of his own.

Oddly enough, critics haven't paid much attention to the principles of design actually employed by successful essayists. These principles are rarely formal patterns of organization , that is, the "modes of exposition" found in many composition textbooks. Instead, they might be described as patterns of thought -- progressions of a mind working out an idea.

Unfortunately, the customary divisions of the essay into opposing types --  formal and informal, impersonal and familiar  -- are also troublesome. Consider this suspiciously neat dividing line drawn by Michele Richman:

Post-Montaigne, the essay split into two distinct modalities: One remained informal, personal, intimate, relaxed, conversational and often humorous; the other, dogmatic, impersonal, systematic and expository .

The terms used here to qualify the term "essay" are convenient as a kind of critical shorthand, but they're imprecise at best and potentially contradictory. Informal can describe either the shape or the tone of the work -- or both. Personal refers to the stance of the essayist, conversational to the language of the piece, and expository to its content and aim. When the writings of particular essayists are studied carefully, Richman's "distinct modalities" grow increasingly vague.

But as fuzzy as these terms might be, the qualities of shape and personality, form and voice, are clearly integral to an understanding of the essay as an artful literary kind. 

Many of the terms used to characterize the essay -- personal, familiar, intimate, subjective, friendly, conversational -- represent efforts to identify the genre's most powerful organizing force: the rhetorical voice or projected character (or persona ) of the essayist.

In his study of Charles Lamb , Fred Randel observes that the "principal declared allegiance" of the essay is to "the experience of the essayistic voice." Similarly, British author Virginia Woolf has described this textual quality of personality or voice as "the essayist's most proper but most dangerous and delicate tool."

Similarly, at the beginning of "Walden, "  Henry David Thoreau reminds the reader that "it is ... always the first person that is speaking." Whether expressed directly or not, there's always an "I" in the essay -- a voice shaping the text and fashioning a role for the reader.

Fictional Qualities

The terms "voice" and "persona" are often used interchangeably to suggest the rhetorical nature of the essayist himself on the page. At times an author may consciously strike a pose or play a role. He can, as E.B. White confirms in his preface to "The Essays," "be any sort of person, according to his mood or his subject matter." 

In "What I Think, What I Am," essayist Edward Hoagland points out that "the artful 'I' of an essay can be as chameleon as any narrator in fiction." Similar considerations of voice and persona lead Carl H. Klaus to conclude that the essay is "profoundly fictive":

It seems to convey the sense of human presence that is indisputably related to its author's deepest sense of self, but that is also a complex illusion of that self -- an enactment of it as if it were both in the process of thought and in the process of sharing the outcome of that thought with others.

But to acknowledge the fictional qualities of the essay isn't to deny its special status as nonfiction.

Reader's Role

A basic aspect of the relationship between a writer (or a writer's persona) and a reader (the implied audience ) is the presumption that what the essayist says is literally true. The difference between a short story, say, and an autobiographical essay  lies less in the narrative structure or the nature of the material than in the narrator's implied contract with the reader about the kind of truth being offered.

Under the terms of this contract, the essayist presents experience as it actually occurred -- as it occurred, that is, in the version by the essayist. The narrator of an essay, the editor George Dillon says, "attempts to convince the reader that its model of experience of the world is valid." 

In other words, the reader of an essay is called on to join in the making of meaning. And it's up to the reader to decide whether to play along. Viewed in this way, the drama of an essay might lie in the conflict between the conceptions of self and world that the reader brings to a text and the conceptions that the essayist tries to arouse.

At Last, a Definition—of Sorts

With these thoughts in mind, the essay might be defined as a short work of nonfiction, often artfully disordered and highly polished, in which an authorial voice invites an implied reader to accept as authentic a certain textual mode of experience.

Sure. But it's still a greased pig.

Sometimes the best way to learn exactly what an essay is -- is to read some great ones. You'll find more than 300 of them in this collection of  Classic British and American Essays and Speeches .

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American Literature, A Definition

Careful survey of literature of a wide variety by authors significantly associated with the United States of America provides an interesting means of appreciating common characteristics of the American peoples. This handout serves as stimuli for such a discussion, and is, by no means, comprehensive. May it stimulate further thinking on what characterizes the literature of a people, particularly the people of the United States.

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The author takes great pleasure in providing the students of American Literature and English Literature; in general, the present work entitled ‘History of American Literature: Facts and Fiction’. The book carries a number of merits and unique features of its own. The treatment is elaborate and comprehensive and the style is lucid and simple but dignified. The present book is equipped with not only the history of American Literature but also a detailed study of the texts prescribed in the course by MJPR University, Bareilly. It vehemently surveys and covers the entire field of American Literature- from the time when Columbus and the Early Settlers wrote their ‘letters home’ down to the present age when the American literary scene is characterized by extreme diversity and complexity. The history of literature has been divided into ages and periods keeping in view the convenience of the students. Major authors and their works have been given as detailed and comprehensive a treatment as possible within the limited scope of a work of this nature. The matter has been meticulously arranged in a chronological order and all superfluity and complexity has been done away with. To capture the history of a past era is not possible without the help of the previous existing records and texts; the author owes its minutest details to the web sites which proved a source of information and feels highly indebted towards it. It is hoped that the book would fully meet the requirements of the examinees in Indian universities and colleges. In a long work involving many continuous hours; some lapses and lacunas are inevitable. Suggestions are duly invited which will be incorporated in the new edition

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American literature: a vanishing subject?

Andrew Delbanco, Julian Clarence Levi Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, has been a Fellow of the American Academy since 2001. He has written extensively on American history and culture, including books such as The Puritan Ordeal  (1989), The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil  (1995), and Required Reading: Why Our American Classics Matter Now  (1997). His latest publication is Melville: His World and Work  (2005).

Some fifty years after the political establishment of the United States, the concept of an American literature barely existed – an absence acknowledged with satisfaction in Sydney Smith’s famous question posed in 1820 in the Edinburgh Review : “Who in the four corners of the globe reads an American book?” The implied answer was no one. Another twenty years would pass before this question was seriously reopened, along with the more fundamental question that lay behind it: whether a provincial democracy that had inherited its language and institutions from the motherland did or should have a literature of its own. Visiting in 1831, Tocqueville could still remark on “the small number of men in the United States who are engaged in the composition of literary works,” and he added justifiably that most of these are “English in substance and still more so in form.” 1

Yet in every settled region of the new nation voices were raised to make the case that a distinctive national literature was desirable and, indeed, essential to the prospects of American civilization. Literary production and learning were conceived as an antidote to, or at least a moderating influence on, the utilitarian values of a young society where, as Jefferson put the matter in 1825, “the first object . . . is bread and covering.” By 1837, the most notable of the many calls for literary nationalism, Emerson’s Phi Beta Kappa oration at Harvard, with its famous charge that “we have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe,” was already a stock statement. By 1850, when Herman Melville weighed in against “literary flunkeyism toward England,” the complaint was a hackneyed one.

During this first phase of national self-consciousness, there arose a corollary critique of those few New World writers, such as Washington Irving, who had achieved international recognition by copying Old World models – writers who, according to belligerent democrats like Walt Whitman, imitated authors who “had their birth in courts” and “smelled of princes’ favors.” These outbursts of nascent cultural pride tended to take the form of shouts and slurs (Whitman spoke sneeringly of “the copious dribble” of poets he deemed less genuinely American than himself ) rather than reasoned debate. They were analogous to, and sometimes part of, the nasty quarrels between Democrats and Whigs in which the former accused the latter of being British-loving sycophants, and the latter accused the former of being demagogues and cheats.

Literary versions of these political disputes played themselves out in the pages of such journals as Putnam’s Monthly Magazine and The Literary World (New York), The Dial and The North American Review (Boston), The United States Magazine and Democratic Review (first Washington, then New York), and The Southern Literary Messenger (Richmond) – magazines that sometimes attained high literary quality (in 1855, Thackeray called Putnam’s “much the best Mag. in the world”). Most contributors to these magazines had nothing to do with academic life, such as it was in the antebellum United States. The literary cadres to which they belonged developed first in Boston; slightly later in New York; and, more modestly, in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Richmond, and Charleston. Only a very few writers or critics, such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whom Harvard appointed to a professorship in 1834, maintained more than a tangential connection to any college. There were as yet no universities. 2

Then, as now, the chief business of literary journalism was the construction and destruction of individual reputations, though at stake throughout the nineteenth century were also more general claims about how and what American writers should be writing. The essays of William Dean Howells, for instance, published as columns in The Atlantic and Harper’s and later selected for his volume Criticism and Fiction (1892), amounted to a brief for what Howells called “realism,” as exemplified by his own fiction. Frank Norris ( The Responsibilities of the Novelist [1903]) and Hamlin Garland ( Crumbling Idols [1894]) proclaimed as universal the principles of whatever ‘school’ – “veritism” for Garland and “naturalism” for Norris – they were committed to at the time. Perhaps the only disinterested critic still worth reading from this period is John Jay Chapman (1862–1933), whose work belongs to the genre of the moral essay in the tradition of Hazlitt and Arnold.

But even such minor novelists as the Norwegian-born H. H. Boyesen (1848–1895) contributed occasional criticism that helped to enlarge the literary horizon. In Boyesen’s slight book of 1893, Literary and Social Silhouettes , for example, he approved such now-forgotten writers as Edgar Fawcett and H. C. Bunner for portraying “the physiognomy of New York – the Bowery, Great Jones Street, and all the labyrinthine tangle of malodorous streets and lanes, inhabited by the tribes of Israel, the swarthy Italian, the wily Chinaman, and all the other alien hordes from all the corners of the earth.” Novelist-critics like Boyesen and James Gibbons Huneker (1860–1921), an advocate of impressionism in painting and music, were among many who tried, with a mixture of anxiety and approval, to come to terms with the impact of modernity on American life. Their critical writing, like their fiction, was more descriptive than prescriptive, more inquiring than inquisitorial – and therefore incipiently modern.

In short, forward-looking proponents of American literary ideals tended to be outside the academy. This has been so from the era dominated by the Duyckinck brothers, whose Cyclopedia of American Literature (1855) helped establish a canon of major writers, through E. C. Stedman’s Poets of America (1885), W. C. Brownell’s American Prose Masters (published in 1909 by Scribners, for whom Brownell served for forty years as literary advisor), and Alfred Kazin’s On Native Grounds (1942), a revelatory book by a young freelance book reviewer who, like his contemporary Irving Howe, did not take a permanent academic job until late in his career. The author who emerged in the twentieth century as the central figure of nineteenth-century American literature, Herman Melville, was championed mainly by critics working outside the academy, such as Lewis Mumford, Charles Olson, and, in Britain, D. H. Lawrence. And a good number of major twentieth-century critics – notably Edmund Wilson, whose Patriotic Gore (1962) did much to revise our understanding of Civil War literature – expressed frank hostility toward academics as hopelessly straitened and petty. Probably the most significant body of American critical writing to date is that of a novelist, Henry James, in the prefaces to the New York edition (1907–1909) of his fiction as well as in his considerable body of literary journalism. “The Art of Fiction” (1888) – James’s riposte to the English critic Walter Besant’s prescriptive essay about the Do’s and Don’ts of fiction-writing – still has tonic power for young writers who feel hampered by prevailing norms and taste. And James’s 1879 study of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the first significant critical biography of an American writer, brings into view in a few pages the whole moral history of nineteenth-century American culture. In that remarkable book, we see how theological ideas were being displaced and how the artist-observer could take pleasure in witnessing their displacement:

It was a necessary condition for a man of Hawthorne’s stock that if his imagination should take licence to amuse itself, it should at least select this grim precinct of the Puritan morality for its play ground . . . . The old Puritan moral sense, the consciousness of sin and hell, of the fearful nature of our responsibilities and the savage character of our Taskmaster – these things had been lodged in the mind of a man of Fancy, whose fancy had straightway begun to take liberties and play tricks with them – to judge them (Heaven forgive him!) from the poetic and aesthetic point of view, the point of view of entertainment and irony. This absence of conviction makes the difference; but the difference is great.

The American-born T. S. Eliot once expressed the view that “the only critics worth reading were the critics who practiced, and practiced well, the art of which they wrote” – a statement that has been almost universally true in America.

At the turn of the twentieth century, however, American writing was beginning to become a ‘field’ in the academic institutions that earlier practitioners had, by and large, avoided. As early as the 1880s, Dartmouth, Wellesley, and Brown were offering, at least sporadically, courses on American authors, though the subject remained dispensable enough that NYU, which ran an American literature course from 1885 to 1888, allowed it to fall into abeyance until 1914. 3 The scholar who first installed the subject in one of the new research universities was Moses Coit Tyler, the child of Connecticut Congregationalists. While a professor at the University of Michigan, he wrote the first serious history of colonial American writing, A History of American Literature, 1607–1765 (1878), based on close study of virtually all published primary texts. In 1881, Tyler moved to Cornell, where he assumed the first university chair devoted wholly to American literature and produced his Literary History of the American Revolution (1897).

It is worth noting that Tyler began teaching at a midwestern state university and concluded his career at the quasi-public Cornell, founded in 1865 with a combination of private benefactions and public subsidies. Older, more tradition-bound private institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, all of which originated in the colonial period as seminaries allied with one or another Protestant denomination, embraced American writing as a plausible field of study more slowly. Once its legitimacy had been established, though, professors of American literature settled into defending the virtues of the (mainly New England) ancients against what Boyesen had called the “alien hordes.” In his Literary History of America (1900), Barrett Wendell, of Harvard, devoted virtually all of its first 450 pages to New England writers, followed by a closing chapter entitled “The Rest of the Story.” In a preface to his new anthology of American literature (1901), Brander Matthews, Columbia’s specialist in dramatic literature, followed Johann Gottfried Herder and Hipployte Taine in insisting that a national literature must be understood as the expression of the “race-characteristics” of the people who produce it. Writing nearly ten years after the death of Walt Whitman, Matthews confidently declared that the United States had “not yet produced any poet even of the second rank.” 4

With the consent of such figures as Wendell at Harvard and Matthews at Columbia, the subject of American literature became an instrument by which the sons of the Anglo-Saxon ‘race’ could get better acquainted with their heritage and, presumably, protect it from the interloping hordes who were threatening to debase it. Here was the literary equivalent of the ‘Teutonic germ theory’ of American history: the idea that democratic ideas and institutions had germinated in the German forests, from which restless tribes carried them to England, where they sprouted again (against the resistance of the Celtic ancestors of the modern Irish) and from which Puritan emigrants eventually transplanted them to the New World. 5 Seen as a branch of this kind of race thinking, the academic study of American literature arose, at least in part, as a defensive maneuver by Anglophile gentlemen who felt their country slipping out of their control into the hands of inferiors.

As a more miscellaneous blend of students began passing through the universities, these gentlemen hoped that the study of American literature could be a means of sweetening and enlightening them before they presented themselves for positions of power no longer reserved exclusively for the Brahmins. Some professors went further, claiming for themselves the moral authority once reserved for the clergy. Consider Irving Babbitt, who specialized at Harvard not in American but in French literature, and who became a public commentator on issues of the day by waging war in general-circulation magazines against what he considered the American tendency toward vulgarity and self-indulgence. Here, in a 1928 essay on H. L. Mencken, with a nod to Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt writes his own version of how Americans had fallen away from the moral realism of their forebears. James had told the tale as the story of Hawthorne liberating himself from the suppressive weight of his ancestors, but Babbitt tells it as a moral descent from self-knowledge into self-deception, as exemplified by Mencken:

If the Protestant Church is at present threatened with bankruptcy, it is not because it has produced an occasional Elmer Gantry. The true reproach it has incurred is that, in its drift toward modernism, it has lost its grip not merely on certain dogmas but, simultaneously, on the facts of human nature. It has failed above all to carry over in some modern and critical form the truth of a dogma that unfortunately received much support from these facts – the dogma of original sin. At first sight Mr. Mencken would appear to have a conviction of evil. . . [but] the appearance . . . is deceptive. The Christian is conscious above all of the “old Adam” in himself: hence his humility. The effect of Mr. Mencken’s writing, on the other hand, is to produce pride rather than humility . . . [as he] conceived of himself as a sort of morose and sardonic divinity surveying from some superior altitude an immeasurable expanse of “boobs.”

Yet even as it served social ends, the study of American literature remained a secondary or even tertiary (after classics and English) part of the program for making boys into gentlemen. To read through the first scholarly history, The Cambridge History of American Literature (1917) – a book more encyclopedic than discriminating – is to be reminded, as Richard Poirier has remarked, that into the third decade of the twentieth century, American literature “was still up for grabs.” 6 As classics departments continued to shrink and English departments to grow, even books by the New England worthies were still treated with condescension. As late as the 1950s, Harvard graduate students in English could propose American literature as a doctoral examination field only as a substitute for medieval literature, which was coming to seem arcane and archaic, even to traditionalists.

With the continued decline of philology and of Latin and Greek as college pre- requisites in the 1930s and 1940s, the study of American literature finally attained a certain academic respectability. Yet the Harvard English department, which preserves in its name, “Department of English and American Literature and Language,” a trace of its origins in philological studies, did not add the phrase ‘and American’ until the 1970s. My own department at Columbia, the “Department of English and Comparative Literature,” to this day does not include in its official name the term ‘American’ – and, as far as I know, has no plans to add it.

Today, though some professors of American literature still feel outnumbered and even beleaguered, the field is populous. Since the founding of the American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association in 1921, the professional status of American literature has been secure, and members of the guild now designate themselves by the term ‘Americanist’ – a word that, like ‘orthopedist’ or ‘taxidermist,’ implies an arduously acquired training for a useful trade.

It is an unfortunate word for various reasons, not least because it obscures the fact that for many years after their subject achieved academic acceptance, Americanists were among the least professionalized of professors. Especially at a time when English departments still devoted themselves mostly to philological research and to the recovery of reliable texts, the field of American literary studies was something of a misfit. It attracted students with current political and cultural problems much on their minds and scholars who seemed unable to rid themselves of what detractors regarded as chronic presentism. For example, the immensely influential Main Currents of American Thought (1927–1930), by V. L. Parrington, an English professor at the University of Washington, was an effort, as tendentious as it was ambitious, to trace the genealogy of democratic populism all the way back to dissident Puritans. Perry Miller’s great revisionary works on the Puritan mind, conceived in the 1930s partly in response to Parrington, ran parallel to the writings of such neo-Calvinist theologians as Reinhold Niebuhr, who retrieved from deep in the past an account of human psychology that might still serve as a competent description of contemporary reality as the horror of fascism engulfed Europe.

As American literary studies gained in prestige, it became apparent that its leading scholars did not trust, and were not to be trusted with, the ways and means of the English department. Many of the vanguard figures were openly and overtly concerned with the world outside the college gates. Some forged at least a tacit partnership with such historians as the senior Arthur M. Schlesinger, who, as early as 1922, had insisted in New Viewpoints in American History that no serious history could be written without attention to the experience of women and that “contrary to a widespread belief, even the people of the thirteen English colonies were a mixture of ethnic breeds.” 7

Yet the originating figures of American literary studies have been described in recent years as narrow-minded men (until the 1970s and 1980s, they were almost all men) with retrograde minds occluded by the sexual and racial prejudices of their time. This is, at best, a caricature and, at worst, a slander. F. O. Matthiessen’s first published book was a study of the fiction of Sarah Orne Jewett (1929). In The New England Mind (1939–1952), Miller showed, long before the ‘New Historicists,’ how close scrutiny of what most of his colleagues considered subliterary forms could reveal an alien culture. Constance Rourke, who never held an academic post but exerted formidable influence on academic literary studies, anticipated in her American Humor (1931) the ‘anthropological turn’ of forty years later by breaking down the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture and reveling in the mix.

American literary studies in these formative years was emphatically un- or even anti-academic. There was a natural affinity between professors interested in the history of their own literature – a short history, after all – and undergraduate writers who hoped to make a place for themselves in the literary histories of the future. Richard Wilbur, who was a Junior Fellow at Harvard in the 1940s, recalls that F. O. Matthiessen was always alert to “any stirrings of the creative spirit” in his students (he taught undergraduates almost exclusively) and made himself available to read manuscripts by the hopeful young poets and playwrights who passed through his courses. 8 Lionel Trilling, though he never carried a portfolio as an Americanist, wrote extensively about American writers past and present – Fitzgerald, Twain, Dreiser, Hemingway, and Frost, among others – and took a special interest in his gifted and eccentric Columbia College student Allen Ginsberg. When Trilling’s colleague Mark Van Doren wrote his exuberant critical biography of Hawthorne in 1948, it was as if he had just heard the young Hawthorne reading in a college common room and had rushed away to report his discovery of a new talent.

Professionalization, of course, was inevitable. By the 1940s, New Criticism was the reigning orthodoxy in literary studies. Among Americanists, it was deployed to best effect in Matthiessen’s American Renaissance (1941) and in the books and essays of Newton Arvin, who spent his career at Smith College. The techniques of New Critical analysis revealed that at least a few American works had a density and complexity comparable to the most difficult, and therefore (according to the criteria of the New Criticism) most rewarding, modernist poems. Matthiessen made his case for Melville by setting Ahab’s speeches in verse and presenting them as every bit as intricate as the soliloquies of Hamlet or Lear. He brought to his writing the kind of formal scrupulosity associated with F. R. Leavis and William Empson in England, and along with fellow travelers Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks (who eventually converged at Yale), he inaugurated a tradition that continues today in the work of such adept close readers as Richard Poirier and William Pritchard.

Although Matthiessen and the best of his followers were never doctrinaire (fifty years after its publication, Daniel Aaron described American Renaissance as “fully cognizant of the social context” of its subject), the vogue of explication de texte threatened to become a formalist dogma. 9 Matthiessen himself was never narrowly a ‘New Critic.’ He was a man of the Left, who after the war was to write a naïve report, From the Heart of Europe (1948), about how impressed he was with life and spirit in the solidifying Soviet bloc. And in his preface to American Renaissance , he declared that what linked his five authors (Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, and Whitman) was their “common devotion to the possibilities of democracy” – an odd assertion about Hawthorne, though one that helps explain the absence of Edgar Allan Poe from Matthiessen’s book. By the 1950s, the turn inward away from politics was in full swing, and testing an author’s literary significance by any political standard was coming to seem eccentric.

One dissenter from the aesthetic turn, Henry Nash Smith, who was among the first recipients of the Ph.D. from the Harvard Committee on the History of American Civilization – and whose dissertation became a remarkable book, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950), a study of the frontier myth in pulp fiction, James Fenimore Cooper’s novels, Wild West shows, and the writings of Jefferson and Twain – complained in 1957 that “the effect of the New Criticism in practice has been to establish an apparently impassable chasm between the facts of our existence in contemporary society and the values of art.” Smith, who by then held a professorship in the Berkeley English department, lodged his objection not on behalf of a historicist understanding of the context in which works of the past had been produced, but on behalf of what would soon come to be known as ‘relevance’ to the present. Here was the keynote of the American studies movement, which flourished in the postwar years as an eclectic alternative to both English and history at a number of universities, including Pennsylvania, George Washington, and Case Western Reserve, as well as at Yale, Harvard, and Berkeley.

On many campuses, American studies seceded, in fact if not always in name, from the English department. American studies scholars sometimes clustered within English as a quasi-independent subdepartment or broke away into departments or programs of their own. They were impatient with the parochialism of what they regarded as Anglophile literary studies, but also, as Smith went on to suggest, with the empiricism of traditional historians: “We are no better off if we turn to the social sciences for help in seeing the culture as a whole. We merely find society without art instead of art without society.” 10 At its best, American studies was a hugely ambitious enterprise that aimed to lay bare the heart of “the culture as a whole” by exposing myths and metaphors that operate below the level of consciousness and by which, according to Smith’s definition of culture, “subjective experience is organized.” To these ends, it assumed a wide mandate, taking into its purview not just literary monuments but monuments of all kinds – there is a direct line from Lewis Mumford’s Sticks and Stones: A Study of American Architecture and Civilization (1924) to Alan Trachtenberg’s Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol (1965).

Even in its more strictly literary manifestations, such as R.W. B. Lewis’s The American Adam (1955), the American studies method was to look through and beyond particular literary texts to find what Lewis called the “recurring pattern of images – ways of seeing and sensing experience” by which Americans apprehend meaning in their lives. 11 Leo Marx, in The Machine in the Garden (1964), showed how writers such as Thoreau and Twain tried to chart a path between rapacious capitalism and radical utopianism – a via media that Marx described as a uniquely American version of pastoral. Smith’s Virgin Land and Lewis’s The American Adam disclosed a national dream of recovering a prelapsarian condition in which the world could begin anew – a dream painfully lost when the dreamer awakes.

The patterns that interested American studies scholars tended to be expressions of progressive hope, and it is perhaps a measure of their intense personal investment in the promise of America that a striking number of leading figures in the field fell into disappointment and even despair. Like Matthiessen, John William Ward, a leading member of the ‘myth and symbol’ school (who, during the Vietnam era, became an outspokenly antiwar president of Amherst College and later a political activist on behalf of public housing), died by suicide. Perry Miller hastened his own death at age fifty-eight by poisoning himself with alcohol a few weeks after the assassination of President Kennedy.

The range and imagination of these scholars were far-reaching, but their intellectual force was centripetal. They wanted to penetrate through a great variety of texts to some unitary core of Americanness. (They construed broadly the word ‘text’ long before the ‘cultural studies’ movement of the 1980s and 1990s discovered the semiotics of fashion, advertising, or sports.) The titles of their books commonly included what today’s scholars would dismiss as ‘totalizing’ or ‘reifying’ phrases, like ‘American character’ (the subtitle of Constance Rourke’s book on humor was “A Study of the National Character”) or ‘American mind,’ as in Alan Heimert’s Religion and the American Mind (1966) or Roderick Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind (1968).

Recently, their movement has come under sharp attack as a collection of insouciant dreamers – men who elided ethnic, racial, class, and gender differences and confused the fantasies of elites with the experiences of ordinary people. In a recent retrospective essay, Leo Marx, now in his eighties, vigorously defends the American studies movement as having always acknowledged discontinuities between America’s claims to egalitarian democracy and the realities of life in a brutally competitive society, where equality of opportunity, much less equality of condition, has never been fully achieved. There was always, Marx insists, an emphasis on the ‘unfinishedness’ of American society as well as a sense that scholar-teachers could contribute to the tradition of “dissident social movements, including, for example, the transcendentalist, feminist, and abolitionist movements of the antebellum era; the populist movement of the 1880s and 1890s; the pre–World War I progressive movement [of which Parrington’s Main Currents was a belated expression], and . . . the left-labor, antifascist movements (and Cultural front) of the 1930s . . . . ” By and large, American studies scholars looked for inspiration not to the mainstream academy, but to what Marx calls an “uncategorizable cohort” of “deviant professors, independent scholars, public intellectuals, and wide-ranging journalists and poets” – among them, Constance Rourke, Thorstein Veblen, Alexis de Tocqueville, D. H. Lawrence, and W. E. B. Du Bois. 12

Amid the enormous upheaval of the 1960s to which Steven Marcus alludes in his overview essay in the present issue of Dædalus, American literary studies, like virtually every other activity in America’s universities, was profoundly transformed. A series of traumatic assassinations (John Kennedy, Medger Evers, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X) and the spiraling disaster of the Vietnam War inevitably darkened the myths and symbols that drew Americanists. The individualist frontiersman of Smith and Lewis became the marauding Indian-killer of Richard Slotkin in his Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (1973) – a book that read the Vietnam War back into the nineteenth-century Indian wars. Henry Nash Smith issued a mea culpa in a late essay (1986) in which he wrote that when he had composed Virgin Land as a young man, he had been under the spell of Frederick Jackson Turner and had already “lost the capacity for facing up to the tragic dimensions of the Westward Movement.” 13 By the 1970s, Perry Miller’s protoexistentialist Puritans, who had struggled to preserve their Calvinist piety in the face of Arminian rationalism, were giving way to Sacvan Bercovitch’s Puritans in his The Puritan Origins of the American Self (1975) and The American Jeremiad (1978) – millenarian crusaders who proclaimed themselves a chosen people charged by God to seize the “wilderness” from the heathens and erect in it a New Jerusalem.

A leader of what might be called second-wave American studies, Bercovitch tried to come to terms with the first wave by dissociating himself from the “tribal totem feast” at which a new generation of scholars was feeding on Miller’s corpus. In 1986, having moved from Columbia to Harvard, he dedicated to Miller and Matthiessen an edited collection of essays by a number of younger scholars whom Frederick Crews, in an unfriendly essay-review, grouped under the rubric “New Americanists.” 14 But reconciliation was elusive. The New Americanists accused Matthiessen of “silencing dissenting political opinions,” 15 by which they seemed to mean that he had been locked into a binary view of the world that pitted American individualism (of which Whitman’s poetry and the free consciousness of Melville’s Ishmael were his prime examples) against repressive totalitarianism (as exemplified in Captain Ahab). Bercovitch himself made a potent argument, similar to that of Louis Hartz in The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), that America lacked any political alternative to a property-oriented, individualist liberalism. His implication was that Americans were peculiarly impoverished in the realm of political ideas, and were condemned, by their inheritance from the millenarian Protestantism of the Puritan founders, to live with the illusion that the American Way is God’s Way.

For the generation of New Americanists who followed Bercovitch, the failure of earlier critics such as Matthiessen (who was often dubbed a ‘cold-war intellectual’ even though he did his major work before the United States entered World War II) was in having erased “potentially disruptive political opinions” from what amounted to a sanitized account of American culture. Matthiessen and his ilk had left conflict out of the story – or so the charge went. As Crews put it, the New Americanists repudiated their predecessors as “timidly moralizing” scholars in thrall to a “genially democratic idea of the American dream and its gradual fulfillment in history.” 16

The patricidal assault took place on two fronts: by trying to show how the major (according to Matthiessen & Co.) works of American literature obscured the oppression of racial minorities as well as America’s history of imperialist expansion, and by recovering from the putative prejudice of the Matthiessen school what Crews called “an ethnic and gender-based anticanon” – literary works by racial minorities and women, who had been ignored and who revealed in their writing that the American dream had always been an American nightmare.

By the late 1990s, the heat of the polemics was subsiding, and the New Americanists were starting to sound old. They fought with their predecessors, after all, mainly over texts whose significance both parties assumed. After the sound and fury of the 1980s – the decade in which the 1960s college generation came into tenured positions and Ronald Reagan came into the White House – a heightened awareness of sexual as well as racial and ethnic difference now almost universally informed American literary criticism. A number of new anthologies, notably the Heath Anthology of American Literature (first edition, 1989), edited by Paul Lauter, and well-researched literary histories, such as Eric Sundquist’s To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (1993), synthesized the work of the preceding two decades and presented a new narrative of American literary history. Previously marginal writers (Martin Delany, Ann Petry, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen) were now key figures in the story; writers who had long been central, such as Cooper and Melville, were revealed as struggling with unresolved racial and sexual preoccupations.

In 1983, while the Heath Anthology was still in progress, Lauter could write that “only a few syllabi meaningfully integrate the work of Hispanic-American, Asian-American, or American Indian writers.” 17 His choice of verb was telling. Representation is one thing, but integration is another. The confines of what had once been regarded as American literature had been exploded. There had once been a more or less official literature, in which writers from John Pendleton Kennedy ( Swallow Barn [1832]) to Margaret Mitchell ( Gone with the Wind [1936]) portrayed black people chiefly as plantation darkies. And most critics had passed over such representations of the serving-class – the sort of people whom Edith Wharton blithely referred to in The House of Mirth (1905) as “dull and ugly people” who must, “in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce” her delicately bred heroine, Lily Bart. But now the reviled and exploited moved to the center of the story – and their voices were heard strongly in the classroom for the first time.

“The changes in our profession,” Lauter wrote, “ . . . are rooted in the movements for racial justice and sex equity. Those who worked in the movements came to see that to sustain hope for a future, people needed to grasp a meaningful past.” In this sense, the revision of the American literary canon was what the Yale cultural critic David Bromwich, playing on Clausewitz’s famous definition of war, has called “politics by other means.” The good news was the enlargement of the canon – an expansion that was, in fact, consistent with the spirit of openness characteristic of American studies from its beginnings. The bad news was the implication that progressive-minded people – people committed to diversity and inclusiveness – could find nothing ‘meaningful’ in what had once been the mainstream American tradition.

But even the changes that made reading lists unrecognizable to students who had attended college just twenty years earlier did not tell the full story of what had happened. Leslie Fiedler, a prolific critic who participated in both waves of the American studies movement, issued, in 1982, what amounted to a farewell to the whole business of academic literary study. “Literary criticism,” he wrote, “flourishes best in societies theoretically committed to transforming all magic into explained illusion, all nighttime mystery into daylight explication: alchemy to chemistry, astrology to astronomy.” 18 This was a restatement of the call for the “grass-roots anti-hierarchical criticism” (Fiedler’s phrase) that Susan Sontag had made in the famous title essay of her book Against Interpretation (1967), where she proclaimed an end to pleasure-deadening literary analysis and called for an “erotics of art.” 19

Fiedler went further. Always a marginal figure with respect to the academic power centers – his teaching posts were at Montana State University and the State University of New York at Buffalo – he had his finger on the pulse of the larger culture. In the age of television and video, he saw that literature was being permanently demoted, at least as a category to which only certain academically certified books were allowed to belong. (Consider the valedictory title he gave to his 1982 collection, What Was Literature?) In Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), Fiedler had long ago ventured into sexual and racial themes that previous critics had evaded; for him, popular culture was where one heard the heartbeat of America. If one were to pay attention to novels, it was best to focus on such disrespected (by academics) books as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin or George Lippard’s Gothic potboiler The Quaker City – in which sadism and secret cravings are unmodified by literary refinement. Fiedler was interested in prose fiction not for the modernist virtues of intricacy or allusiveness but for its democratizing power as an early form of mass art. The popular novel, he saw, was the precursor to Hollywood movies and tv soap operas; it had, he thought, a power of democratic leveling comparable to the ‘ready-made garments’ that, in the early twentieth century, “made it impossible to tell an aristocrat from a commoner.” 20

While younger Americanists were settling scores with their predecessors over such issues as the proper interpretation of Moby-Dick or The Scarlet Letter , or whether Margaret Fuller should be rescued from Emerson’s shadow, Fiedler recognized that the commercial productions of popular culture – mass-market movies and television, but also comic books, advertising, and fashion – were entering academia as legitimate subjects, and that the old academic disputes over literary classics were devolving into quibbles. It was not surprising that by the 1980s there had arrived onto course syllabi such nineteenth-century bestsellers as Susan Warner’s Wide, Wide World (1850) and Maria Cummins’s The Lamplighter (1854) – now championed by feminist critics such as Jane Tompkins (in Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction [1985]), who made the case for exactly those books that Nathaniel Hawthorne had dismissed more than a century earlier as drivel by a “damned mob of scribbling women.”

Today, students of American literature are still working out these issues: What kinds of cultural artifacts allow access to the inner life of the culture? What role, if any, should aesthetic judgment (and according to what criteria) play in the study of written texts? New lines of internal relations within American literature have lately emerged with the rise of a movement known as ‘ecocriticism’ – lines that run, for instance, from Thoreau through Aldo Leopold to Rachel Carson and up to Barry Lopez. 21 The histrionics and name calling of the ‘culture wars’ are gone if not entirely forgotten – yet literary studies seem likely to remain divided for a while between those who follow the Frankfurt School critics Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin in regarding mass culture as a kind of soft propaganda by which the public degenerates into the mob, and those who celebrate popular culture as a roiling scene of imaginative liberation – as does University of Pennsylvania Americanist Janice Radway in her influential book Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (1984), and, more recently, in her Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month-Club, Literary Taste, and Middle Class Desire (1997).

Today, the situation seems strikingly symmetrical with that with which this essay began. In the early nineteenth century, a case had to be made for the existence – not to mention the significance – of American literature. In the early years of the twenty-first century, this case has to be made again.

There is reason to feel a certain sense of déjà vu. For one thing, the legitimacy of the very idea of the nation-state is under siege in academic circles, where perhaps the most cited book of the last three decades is Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983). Shocked by the resurgence of nationalism in a century when Marxist intellectuals expected it to decline before the advance of international worker solidarity, Anderson defined nationalism as a kind of atavism for which deluded millions have been willing to kill and die. In this context, the idea of a national literature seems, at best, to furnish an opportunity to expose the mechanisms (such as the literary creation of patriotic myth) by which the nation-state maintains itself and, at worst, to be complicit with the criminality of the nation-state itself.

Another way to see what has happened is to recall Robert Bellah’s famous Dædalus essay written in 1967, in which Bellah accurately predicted that the American nation would split apart into factions of “liberal alienation” and “fundamentalist ossification” with respect to the “set of beliefs, symbols, and rituals” that he called “civil religion.” 22 Among academic humanists, who are overwhelmingly liberal and alienated from religion in both its civil and fundamentalist forms, it is hardly possible today to use the term ‘American’ without irony or embarrassment.

We all recognize the gestures of disavowal. Scholars in many fields are going through the same motions; here is an example from a recent book on a subject that once would have been called Chinese art:

This book is very deliberately called Art in China, and not Chinese Art, because it is written out of a distrust of the existence of any unifying principles or essences linking such a wide range of made things, things of very different types, having very different dates, very different materials, and very different makers, audiences, and contexts of use. 23

In 1999, Janice Radway, in her inaugural address as president of the American Studies Association, suggested that the phrase ‘American studies’ be deleted from the name of the organization in favor of the term ‘United States studies’ – an act of purification that would save its members from implicitly endorsing the hegemonic ambitions of the United States to dominate (at least) the north and south ‘American’ continents.

Without embracing the strategies of self-acquittal these scholars propose, one may share their wariness toward the nation-state as an object of veneration. Quasi-genetic ideas of race solidarity have always polluted feelings of nationalness (as late as 1934, one finds Edith Wharton blithely remarking on the “boyish love of pure nonsense only to be found in Anglo-Saxons” 24 ), and no one who has come of age since World War II can dissociate such ideas from the hideous consequences that have sometimes followed from them.

Moreover, there is no blinking the fact that American literary studies must now make their way in a postcolonial world in which we are perforcedly conscious that nations are fragile works of artifice; we have lately witnessed bloody struggles over just what sort of nation is (or was) Kuwait, Israel, the former Yugoslavia, a future Palestine, Iraq, and Ukraine, to name just a few – and Americans, as citizens of the sole superpower, must continually consider what sort of obligation these and other nations exert upon us to preserve what used to be called their ‘right of self-determination.’

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the legitimacy of American literary studies, narrowly – that is, nationally – construed, is under skeptical scrutiny. Ever since the Vietnam War, many American intellectuals have been more or less ashamed of America, and the recent Iraq War, with its unilateralist and messianic rhetoric, has only made matters worse. In 1963, the Voice of America organized a series of radio lectures on American literature in which the scholarly authorities of the day, including some who held strong Left views, participated: Henry Nash Smith, Wallace Stegner, Daniel Aaron, Carlos Baker, Irving Howe, Kay House, David Levin, Richard Poirier, John Berryman, among others. It is simply impossible to imagine such a collaboration between the government and the academy today.

Nor is it surprising that what is sometimes called America-centrism has become an embarrassment to today’s Americanists. To use a prevalent term, the field is being ‘decentered’ through study and translation of texts written in America in languages other than English (one doubts how far this movement can go, since our educational system is almost entirely monolingual) by such scholars as Lisa Sanchez Gonzalez, Lawrence Rosenwald, Werner Sollors, and Marc Shell. In 2000, Sollors’s and Shell’s Multilingual Anthology of American Literature presented a host of hitherto unknown texts in more than a dozen Native American, European, and Asian languages, with English translations on facing pages. There is, as well, a movement afoot – inaugurated some twenty years ago by Bell Gale Chevigny and Gari Laguardia, the editors of Reinventing the Americas: Comparative Studies of Literature of the United States and Spanish America (1986), and lately forwarded in such books as Anne Goldman’s Continental Divides: Revisioning American Literature (2000) – to reject the nation’s borders as impermeable lines dividing ‘American’ literature from the literature of adjacent and overlapping cultures.

In January 2003, a special issue of PMLA , devoted in a skeptical mood to “America: The Idea, the Literature,” included an essay asserting that “American literature should be seen as no longer bound to the inner workings of any particular country or imagined organic community but instead as interwoven systematically with traversals between national territory and intercontinental space.” 25 And there are efforts under way to ‘redraw the map of American literature’ by pushing back its boundaries in time as well as space. The Yale Americanist Wai Chee Dimock has proposed a new set of coordinates by which she would redraw Emerson’s literary affiliations and see him in relation not so much, say, to Bronson Alcott, as to the Vishnu Parana or the Koran. “Deep time” is Dimock’s name for this temporal reorganization, and, she adds, “deep time is denationalized space.” 26

So far, these attempts to develop postnational ideas of American literature are too diffuse to bear much weight. And, as is often the case, transformations in the academic humanities tend to be secondary to more basic transformations in the world. Once a province of Europe, America has become the power center of a planet convulsed by a variety of resistance movements – armed and otherwise – against it. Yet accompanying the sense of America as a center of consolidated power is a sense that any coherent notion of American identity is coming apart. Can we call American a business corporation whose employees work in factories in Sri Lanka and whose assets are deposited in Caribbean banks? Is an illegal immigrant who crosses from Mexico into Texas in order to find menial work an American? With such questions in the air, why should the idea of an American literature escape interrogation?

As for what kind of answers might emerge, the old ones will clearly no longer do. At the beginning of our story, the proponents of an American literature proclaimed its distinctiveness chiefly with respect to the burdensome precedent of the literature of England – but to dwell on that distinction today would seem to participate in what Freud called the “narcissism of minor differences.” Matthew Arnold’s point is again oddly pertinent: “I see advertised The Primer of American Literature,” he wrote in 1874. “I imagine the face of Philip or Alexander at hearing of a Primer of Macedonian Literature! . . . We are all contributors to one great literature – English literature.” These sentences, quoted by Marcus Cunliffe at the opening of his The Literature of the United States (1954), would have once pleased only culturally conservative Anglophiles; but today, Arnold’s words (if not his tone) are perfectly consonant with the view from the cultural Left, for whom the hyphen in ‘Anglo-American’ marks a trivial division between two barely distinguishable nations driven by the same imperialist aims. The idea of an American literature has come to seem provincial again.

Yet if one looks beyond the insular academy to a new generation of young American writers, one encounters a salient – and historically recurrent – difference in tone and attitude that continues to divide academic critics from actual practitioners. To read, say, Gish Jen’s novel Typical American (1991) or Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker (1995) is to be struck by how a few changes in the scenic incidentals, or a few substitutions of Yiddish for Chinese or Korean phrases, would render these works, with their historically recurrent tale of Old World parents versus New World children, almost indistinguishable in plot and structure from the Jewish immigrant novels of Abraham Cahan (Yekl, 1896) or Anzia Yezierska ( The Bread Givers, 1925 ). Writers present have always felt the parental presence of writers past. They register their debts with large acts of homage, as when Ralph Ellison honors the man after whom he was named, Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Invisible Man (1951), or with small allusive gestures, as when Philip Roth opens The Great American Novel (1973) with a Melvillean sentence: “Call me Smitty.”

The work of redefining, and thereby sustaining, American literature has always been mainly carried on by writers who aspire to become part of it, not by professors who dismiss its validity or doubt its existence. In that respect, not much has changed.

1 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2 (New York: Vintage, 1990), 55–56.

2 Several mid-twentieth-century literary historians, notably William Charvat in The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800–1870 (a collection of essays written between 1937 and 1962), Perry Miller in The Raven and the Whale (1956), and Benjamin T. Spencer in The Quest for Nationality (1957), have sketched the emergence of the literary profession in these years as part of the larger construction of American nationalism in the age of territorial expansion. More recent scholars, such as James D. Wallace in Early Cooper and his Audience (1985) and Meredith McGill in American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (2003), have deepened our understanding of the economic difficulties that writers without patronage, and without much protection by copyright law, had to overcome.

3 Kermit Vanderbilt, American Literature and the Academy: The Roots, Growth, and Maturity of a Profession (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 110.

4 Brander Matthews, “Suggestions for Teachers of American Literature,” Educational Review 21 (January–May 1901): 12.

5 See Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 87–88.

6 Richard Poirier, The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections (New York: Random House, 1987), 19.

7 Arthur M. Schlesinger, New Viewpoints in American History (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 3, 126–127.

8 Richard Wilbur in F. O. Matthiessen ( 1902–1950 ): A Collective Portrait, ed. Paul M. Sweezy and Leo Huberman (New York: Henry Schuman, 1950), 145.

9 Daniel Aaron, review of H. Lark Hall, V. L. Parrington: Through the Avenue of Art in the New Republic, September 5, 1994. By the early 1960s, one of Matthiessen’s successors at Harvard, Howard Mumford Jones, faulted Ralph Waldo Emerson for writing essays that amounted to “paragraphs on a string” and thereby failed the New Critical test of formal coherence. H. M. Jones, introduction to a new edition of W. C. Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol (1965). Brownell, American Prose Masters (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), vii. This sort of opinion mongering in the guise of objective judgment was not a healthy development for the field.

10 Henry Nash Smith, “Can ‘American Studies’ Develop a Method?” American Quarterly 9 (Summer 1957): 203.

11 A cogent critique of the ‘myth and symbol’ school is Bruce Kuklick, “Myth and Symbol in American Studies,” American Quarterly 24 (4) (October 1972): 435–450. Kuklick doubts that we can apprehend anything so vague as ‘popular consciousness’ by elucidating the structure of artifacts, such as books or paintings, or even political events, such as speeches or elections.

12 Leo Marx, “Believing in America,” Boston Review 28 (6) (December 2003–January 2004): 28–31.

13 Henry Nash Smith, “Symbol and Idea in Virgin Land,” in Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen, eds., Ideology and Classic American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 28.

14 Sacvan Bercovitch, ed., Reconstructing American Literary History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986). Crews coined the term in “Whose American Renaissance?” New York Review of Books, October 27, 1988, and carried his critique further in “The New Americanists,” New York Review of Books, September 24, 1992.

15 Donald Pease, “Moby-Dick and the Cold War,” in The American Renaissance Reconsidered , ed., Walter Benn Michaels and Donald Pease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 119.

16 Crews, “New Americanists,” 32–34.

17 Paul Lauter, ed., Reconstructing American Literature: Courses, Syllabi, Issues (Old Westbury, N.Y.: The Feminist Press, 1983), xiv.

18 Leslie Fiedler, What was Literature?: Class Culture and Mass Society (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 37.

19 Ibid., 117. Sontag’s essay was itself a restatement of an argument against argument put forth around the same time by Roland Barthes.

20 Ibid., 99.

21 The impact of environmentalism in American literary studies is well represented in two books by Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), and Buell, Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001).

22 Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” in Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post- Traditional World (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 183.

23 Craig Clunas, Art in China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 10.

24 Edith Wharton, A Backward Glanc e (New York: Scribners, 1934), 157.

25 Paul Giles, “Transnationalism and Classic American Literature,” PMLA 118 (1) (January 2003): 63.

26 Wai Chee Dimock, “Deep Time: American Literature and World History,” American Literary History 13 (4) (2001): 760.

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Periods of American Literature

The history of American literature reaches from the oral traditions of Native peoples to the novels, poetry, and drama created in the United States today. This list describes its six major periods.

Pre-colonization

Literature has been created in what is today the United States for thousands of years. This history began with the many oral traditions of the Indigenous peoples of North America .

Among the Native peoples of the Plains, the Southwest, and parts of present-day California, Coyote was the central figure of the age before humans were created. Hundreds of tales told by these peoples describe his exploits as a trickster and as a benefactor to humankind.

Raven was Coyote’s counterpart for the Indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast, the Pacific coast stretching from what is today Alaska to northwestern California. The Raven cycle is a collection of tales that describe the chaos that Raven creates and the order that eventually emerges, often at Raven’s expense.

The oral traditions of the Pueblo, in the Southwest, include stories about kachinas , the ancestral spirit-beings that exist among humans and actively shape their environment.

Among the Native peoples of the Plains, a wide range of creation myths explain how the world came into existence. The stories of the Comanche, for example, center on the Great Spirit, which created different groups of humans, while the Sioux describe how the winds came into being and, together with the Sun and the Moon, control the universe.

The Colonial and Early National Period (17th century–1830)

The first colonists of North America wrote, often in English, about their experiences starting in the 1600s. This literature was practical, straightforward, often derivative of literature in Great Britain , and focused on the future.

John Smith wrote histories of Virginia based on his experiences as an English explorer and as president of the Jamestown Colony. These histories, published in 1608 and 1624, include his controversial accounts of the Powhatan girl Pocahontas .

Nathaniel Ward and John Winthrop wrote books on religion, a topic of central concern in colonial America.

Anne Bradstreet ’s The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650) may be the earliest collection of poetry written in and about America, although it was published in England.

A new era began when the United States declared its independence in 1776, and much new writing addressed the country’s future. American poetry and fiction were largely modeled on what was being published overseas in Great Britain, and much of what American readers consumed also came from Great Britain.

The Federalist Papers (1787–88), by Alexander Hamilton , James Madison , and John Jay , shaped the political direction of the United States.

Benjamin Franklin ’s Autobiography , which he wrote during the 1770s and ’80s, tells a quintessentially American life story.

Phillis Wheatley , an African woman enslaved in Boston, was the first Black poet of note in the United States. Her first book was Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). Philip Freneau is another notable poet of the era.

The first American novel, The Power of Sympathy by William Hill Brown , was published in 1789.

Olaudah Equiano ’s autobiography, The Interesting Narrative (1789), is among the earliest slave narratives and stands as a forceful argument for abolition.

By the first decades of the 19th century, a truly American literature began to emerge. Though still derived from British literary tradition, the short stories and novels published from 1800 through the 1820s began to depict American society and explore the American landscape in an unprecedented manner.

Washington Irving published the collection of short stories and essays The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. in 1819–20. It includes “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” two of the earliest American short stories.

James Fenimore Cooper wrote novels of adventure about the frontiersman Natty Bumppo. These novels, called the Leatherstocking Tales (1823–41), depict his experiences in the American wilderness in both realistic and highly romanticized ways.

The Romantic Period (1830–70)

Romanticism is a way of thinking that values the individual over the group, the subjective over the objective, and a person’s emotional experience over reason. It also values the wildness of nature over human-made order. Romanticism as a worldview took hold in western Europe in the late 18th century, and American writers embraced it in the early 19th century.

Edgar Allan Poe most vividly depicted, and inhabited, the role of the Romantic individual—a genius, often tormented and always struggling against convention—during the 1830s and up to his mysterious death in 1849.

Poe invented the modern detective story with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841).

The poem “The Raven” (1845) is a gloomy depiction of lost love. Its eeriness is intensified by its meter and rhyme scheme.

The short stories “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) and “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846) are gripping tales of horror.

In New England, several different groups of writers and thinkers emerged after 1830, each exploring the experiences of individuals in different segments of American society.

James Russell Lowell was among those who used humor and dialect in verse and prose to depict everyday life in the Northeast.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes were the most prominent of the upper-class Brahmins , who filtered their depiction of America through European models and sensibilities.

The Transcendentalists developed an elaborate philosophy that saw in all of creation a unified whole. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote influential essays, while Henry David Thoreau wrote Walden (1854), an account of his life alone by Walden Pond. Margaret Fuller was editor of The Dial , an important Transcendentalist magazine.

Three men— Nathaniel Hawthorne , Herman Melville , and Walt Whitman —began publishing novels, short stories, and poetry during the Romantic period that became some of the most-enduring works of American literature.

As a young man, Hawthorne published short stories, most notable among them the allegorical “Young Goodman Brown” (1835). In the 1840s he crossed paths with the Transcendentalists before he started writing his two most significant novels— The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851).

Melville was one of Hawthorne’s friends and neighbors. Hawthorne was also a strong influence on Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), which was the culmination of Melville’s early life of traveling and writing.

Whitman wrote poetry that described his home, New York City. He refused the traditional constraints of rhyme and meter in favor of free verse in Leaves of Grass (1855), and his frankness in subject matter and tone repelled some critics. But the book, which went through many subsequent editions , became a landmark in American poetry, and it epitomized the ethos of the Romantic period.

During the 1850s, as the United States headed toward civil war, more and more stories by and about enslaved and free Black people were written.

William Wells Brown published what is often considered the first Black American novel, Clotel , in 1853. He also wrote the first African American play to be published, The Escape (1858).

In 1859 Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Harriet E. Wilson became the first Black women to publish fiction in the United States.

Harriet Beecher Stowe ’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin , first published serially in 1851–52, is credited with raising opposition in the North to slavery.

Harriet Jacobs published a searing account of her life as an enslaved woman in 1861, the same year that the Civil War began. It became one of the era’s most influential slave narratives.

Emily Dickinson lived a life quite unlike other writers of the Romantic period: she lived largely in seclusion; only a handful of her poems were published before her death in 1886; and she was a woman working at a time when men dominated the literary scene. Yet her poems express a Romantic vision as clearly as Whitman’s or Poe’s. They are sharp-edged and emotionally intense. Here are five of her notable poems:

“I’m Nobody! Who are you?”

“Because I could not stop for Death –”

“My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun”

“A Bird, came down the Walk –”

“Safe in their Alabaster Chambers”

Realism and Naturalism (1870–1910)

The human cost of the Civil War in the United States was immense: more than 2,300,000 soldiers fought in the war, and perhaps as many as 851,000 people died in 1861–65. Walt Whitman claimed that “a great literature will…arise out of the era of those four years,” and what emerged in the following decades was a literature that presented a detailed and unembellished vision of the world as it truly was. This was the essence of realism . Naturalism was an intensified form of realism. After the grim realities of a devastating war, these styles became writers’ primary mode of expression.

Samuel Clemens was a typesetter, a journalist, a riverboat captain, and an itinerant laborer before he became, in 1863 at age 27, Mark Twain . He first used that name while reporting on politics in the Nevada Territory. It then appeared on the short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” published in 1865, which catapulted him to national fame. Twain’s story was a humorous tall tale, but its characters were realistic depictions of actual Americans. Twain deployed this combination of humor and realism throughout his writing. The following are some of Twain’s notable works:

Major novels: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)

Travel narratives: The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), Life on the Mississippi (1883)

Short stories: “Jim Baker’s Blue-Jay Yarn” (1880), “The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg” (1899)

Naturalism, like realism, was a literary movement that drew inspiration from French authors of the 19th century who sought to document, through fiction, the reality that they saw around them, particularly among the middle and working classes living in cities.

Theodore Dreiser was foremost among American writers who embraced naturalism. His Sister Carrie (1900) is the most important American naturalist novel.

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) and The Red Badge of Courage (1895), by Stephen Crane , and McTeague (1899), The Octopus (1901), and The Pit (1903), by Frank Norris , are novels that vividly depict the reality of urban life, war, and capitalism.

Paul Laurence Dunbar was an African American writer who wrote poetry in Black dialect— “Possum” and “When de Co’n Pone’s Hot” —that were popular with his white audience and gave them what they believed was reality for Black Americans. Dunbar also wrote poems not in dialect— “We Wear the Mask” and “Sympathy” —that exposed the reality of racism in America during Reconstruction and afterward.

Sophia Alice Callahan , who was of Muskogee Creek descent, published in 1891 what is often considered the first novel by a Native woman: Wynema: A Child of the Forest . Zitkala-Sa , whose mother was Yankton Sioux, published a collection of Dakota stories, Old Indian Legends , in 1901. She used this collection and other early writings to document her experience of forced assimilation, and she spent the rest of her life advocating for Native peoples.

Henry James shared the view of the realists and naturalists that literature ought to present reality, but his writing style and use of literary form sought to also create an aesthetic experience, not simply document truth. He was preoccupied with the clash in values between the United States and Europe. His writing shows features of both 19th-century realism and naturalism and 20th-century modernism. Some of his notable novels include:

The American (1877)

The Portrait of a Lady (1881)

What Maisie Knew (1897)

The Wings of the Dove (1902)

The Golden Bowl (1904)

The Modernist Period (1910–45)

Advances in science and technology in Western countries rapidly intensified at the start of the 20th century and brought about a sense of unprecedented progress. The devastation of World War I and the Great Depression also caused widespread suffering in Europe and the United States. These contradictory impulses can be found swirling within modernism , a movement in the arts defined first and foremost as a radical break from the past. But this break was often an act of destruction, and it caused a loss of faith in traditional structures and beliefs. Despite, or perhaps because of, these contradictory impulses, the modernist period proved to be one of the richest and most productive in American literature.

A sense of disillusionment and loss pervades much American modernist fiction. That sense may be centered on specific individuals, or it may be directed toward American society or toward civilization generally. It may generate a nihilistic, destructive impulse, or it may express hope at the prospect of change.

F. Scott Fitzgerald skewered the American Dream in The Great Gatsby (1925).

Richard Wright exposed and attacked American racism in Native Son (1940).

Zora Neale Hurston told the story of a Black woman’s three marriages in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).

Ernest Hemingway ’s early novels The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929) articulated the disillusionment of the Lost Generation .

Willa Cather told hopeful stories of the American frontier, set mostly on the Great Plains, in O Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918).

William Faulkner used stream-of-consciousness monologues and other formal techniques to break from past literary practice in The Sound and the Fury (1929).

John Steinbeck depicted the difficult lives of migrant workers in Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939).

T.S. Eliot was an American by birth and, as of 1927, a British subject by choice. His fragmentary, multivoiced The Waste Land (1922) is the quintessential modernist poem, but his was not the dominant voice among American modernist poets.

Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg evocatively described the regions—New England and the Midwest, respectively—in which they lived.

The Harlem Renaissance produced a rich coterie of poets, among them Countee Cullen , Langston Hughes , Claude McKay , and Alice Dunbar Nelson .

Harriet Monroe founded Poetry magazine in Chicago in 1912 and made it the most important organ for poetry not just in the United States but for the English-speaking world.

During the 1920s Edna St. Vincent Millay , Marianne Moore , and E.E. Cummings expressed a spirit of revolution and experimentation in their poetry.

Drama came to prominence for the first time in the United States in the early 20th century. Playwrights drew inspiration from European theater but created plays that were uniquely and enduringly American.

Eugene O’Neill was the foremost American playwright of the period. His Long Day’s Journey into Night (written 1939–41, performed 1956) was the high point of more than 20 years of creativity that began in 1920 with Beyond the Horizon and concluded with The Iceman Cometh (written 1939, performed 1946).

During the 1930s Lillian Hellman , Clifford Odets , and Langston Hughes wrote plays that exposed injustice in America.

Thornton Wilder presented a realistic (and enormously influential) vision of small-town America in Our Town , first produced in 1938.

The Contemporary Period (1945–present)

The United States, which emerged from World War II confident and economically strong, entered the Cold War in the late 1940s. This conflict with the Soviet Union shaped global politics for more than four decades, and the proxy wars and threat of nuclear annihilation that came to define it were just some of the influences shaping American literature during the second half of the 20th century. The 1950s and ’60s brought significant cultural shifts within the United States driven by the civil rights movement and the women’s rights movement . By the turn of the 21st century, American literature was recognized as being a complex, inclusive story that is grounded on a wide-ranging body of past writings produced in the United States by people of different backgrounds and is open to the experiences of more and more Americans in the present day.

Literature written by African Americans during the contemporary period was shaped in many ways by Richard Wright, whose autobiography Black Boy was published in 1945. He left the United States for France after World War II, repulsed by the injustice and discrimination he faced as a Black man in America; other Black writers working from the 1950s through the ’70s also wrestled with the desires to escape an unjust society and to change it.

Ralph Ellison ’s novel Invisible Man (1952) tells the story of an unnamed Black man adrift in, and ignored by, America.

James Baldwin wrote essays, novels, and plays on race and sexuality throughout his life, but his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), was his most accomplished and influential.

Lorraine Hansberry ’s A Raisin in the Sun , a play about the effects of racism in Chicago, was first performed in 1959.

Gwendolyn Brooks became, in 1950, the first African American poet to win a Pulitzer Prize.

The Black Arts movement was grounded in the tenets of Black nationalism and sought to generate a uniquely Black consciousness. The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), by Malcolm X and Alex Haley , is among its most-lasting literary expressions.

Toni Morrison ’s first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), launched a writing career that would put the lives of Black women at its center. She received a Nobel Prize in 1993.

In the 1960s Alice Walker began writing novels, poetry, and short stories that reflected her involvement in the civil rights movement.

The American novel took on a dizzying number of forms after World War II. Realist, metafictional, postmodern, absurdist, autobiographical, short, long, fragmentary, feminist, stream of consciousness—these and dozens more labels can be applied to the vast output of American novelists. Little holds them together beyond their chronological proximity and engagement with contemporary American society. These are representative novels:

Norman Mailer : The Naked and the Dead (1948), The Executioner’s Song (1979)

Vladimir Nabokov : Lolita (1955)

Jack Kerouac : On the Road (1957)

Thomas Pynchon : The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

N. Scott Momaday : House Made of Dawn (1968)

Kurt Vonnegut : Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

Eudora Welty : The Optimist’s Daughter (1972)

Philip Roth : Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), American Pastoral (1997)

Ursula K. Le Guin : The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)

Saul Bellow : Humboldt’s Gift (1975)

Toni Morrison : Song of Solomon (1977), Beloved (1987)

Alice Walker : The Color Purple (1982)

Sandra Cisneros : The House on Mango Street (1983)

Jamaica Kincaid : Annie John (1984)

Maxine Hong Kingston : Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989)

David Foster Wallace : Infinite Jest (1996)

Don DeLillo : Underworld (1997)

Ha Jin : Waiting (1999)

Jonathan Franzen : The Corrections (2001)

Junot Díaz : The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007)

Colson Whitehead : The Underground Railroad (2016)

Ocean Vuong : On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

The Beat movement was short-lived—starting and ending in the 1950s—but had a lasting influence on American poetry during the contemporary period. Allen Ginsberg ’s Howl (1956) pushed aside the formal, largely traditional poetic conventions that had come to dominate American poetry. Raucous, profane, and deeply moving, Howl reset Americans’ expectations for poetry during the second half of the 20th century and beyond. Among the important poets of this period are the following:

Anne Sexton

Sylvia Plath

John Berryman

Donald Hall

Elizabeth Bishop

James Merrill

Nikki Giovanni

Robert Pinsky

Adrienne Rich

Yusef Komunyakaa

W.S. Merwin

Tracy K. Smith

In the early decades of the contemporary period, American drama was dominated by three men: Arthur Miller , Tennessee Williams , and Edward Albee . Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) questioned the American Dream through the destruction of its main character, while Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) excavated his characters’ dreams and frustrations. Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) rendered what might have been a benign domestic situation into something vicious and cruel. By the 1970s the face of American drama had begun to change, and it continued to diversify into the 21st century. Notable dramatists include:

David Mamet

Amiri Baraka

Sam Shepard

August Wilson

Ntozake Shange

Wendy Wasserstein

Tony Kushner

David Henry Hwang

Richard Greenberg

Suzan-Lori Parks

Young Jean Lee

Jeremy O. Harris

• Literary Terms
• Definition & Examples
• When & How to Write an Essay

I. What is an Essay?

An essay is a form of writing in paragraph form that uses informal language, although it can be written formally. Essays may be written in first-person point of view (I, ours, mine), but third-person (people, he, she) is preferable in most academic essays. Essays do not require research as most academic reports and papers do; however, they should cite any literary works that are used within the paper.

When thinking of essays, we normally think of the five-paragraph essay: Paragraph 1 is the introduction, paragraphs 2-4 are the body covering three main ideas, and paragraph 5 is the conclusion. Sixth and seventh graders may start out with three paragraph essays in order to learn the concepts. However, essays may be longer than five paragraphs. Essays are easier and quicker to read than books, so are a preferred way to express ideas and concepts when bringing them to public attention.

II. Examples of Essays

Many of our most famous Americans have written essays. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson wrote essays about being good citizens and concepts to build the new United States. In the pre-Civil War days of the 1800s, people such as:

• Ralph Waldo Emerson (an author) wrote essays on self-improvement
• Susan B. Anthony wrote on women’s right to vote
• Frederick Douglass wrote on the issue of African Americans’ future in the U.S.

Through each era of American history, well-known figures in areas such as politics, literature, the arts, business, etc., voiced their opinions through short and long essays.

The ultimate persuasive essay that most students learn about and read in social studies is the “Declaration of Independence” by Thomas Jefferson in 1776. Other founding fathers edited and critiqued it, but he drafted the first version. He builds a strong argument by stating his premise (claim) then proceeds to give the evidence in a straightforward manner before coming to his logical conclusion.

III. Types of Essays

A. expository.

Essays written to explore and explain ideas are called expository essays (they expose truths). These will be more formal types of essays usually written in third person, to be more objective. There are many forms, each one having its own organizational pattern.  Cause/Effect essays explain the reason (cause) for something that happens after (effect). Definition essays define an idea or concept. Compare/ Contrast essays will look at two items and show how they are similar (compare) and different (contrast).

b. Persuasive

An argumentative paper presents an idea or concept with the intention of attempting to change a reader’s mind or actions . These may be written in second person, using “you” in order to speak to the reader. This is called a persuasive essay. There will be a premise (claim) followed by evidence to show why you should believe the claim.

c. Narrative

Narrative means story, so narrative essays will illustrate and describe an event of some kind to tell a story. Most times, they will be written in first person. The writer will use descriptive terms, and may have paragraphs that tell a beginning, middle, and end in place of the five paragraphs with introduction, body, and conclusion. However, if there is a lesson to be learned, a five-paragraph may be used to ensure the lesson is shown.

d. Descriptive

The goal of a descriptive essay is to vividly describe an event, item, place, memory, etc. This essay may be written in any point of view, depending on what’s being described. There is a lot of freedom of language in descriptive essays, which can include figurative language, as well.

IV. The Importance of Essays

Essays are an important piece of literature that can be used in a variety of situations. They’re a flexible type of writing, which makes them useful in many settings . History can be traced and understood through essays from theorists, leaders, artists of various arts, and regular citizens of countries throughout the world and time. For students, learning to write essays is also important because as they leave school and enter college and/or the work force, it is vital for them to be able to express themselves well.

V. Examples of Essays in Literature

Sir Francis Bacon was a leading philosopher who influenced the colonies in the 1600s. Many of America’s founding fathers also favored his philosophies toward government. Bacon wrote an essay titled “Of Nobility” in 1601 , in which he defines the concept of nobility in relation to people and government. The following is the introduction of his definition essay. Note the use of “we” for his point of view, which includes his readers while still sounding rather formal.

 “We will speak of nobility, first as a portion of an estate, then as a condition of particular persons. A monarchy, where there is no nobility at all, is ever a pure and absolute tyranny; as that of the Turks. For nobility attempers sovereignty, and draws the eyes of the people, somewhat aside from the line royal. But for democracies, they need it not; and they are commonly more quiet, and less subject to sedition, than where there are stirps of nobles. For men’s eyes are upon the business, and not upon the persons; or if upon the persons, it is for the business’ sake, as fittest, and not for flags and pedigree. We see the Switzers last well, notwithstanding their diversity of religion, and of cantons. For utility is their bond, and not respects. The united provinces of the Low Countries, in their government, excel; for where there is an equality, the consultations are more indifferent, and the payments and tributes, more cheerful. A great and potent nobility, addeth majesty to a monarch, but diminisheth power; and putteth life and spirit into the people, but presseth their fortune. It is well, when nobles are not too great for sovereignty nor for justice; and yet maintained in that height, as the insolency of inferiors may be broken upon them, before it come on too fast upon the majesty of kings. A numerous nobility causeth poverty, and inconvenience in a state; for it is a surcharge of expense; and besides, it being of necessity, that many of the nobility fall, in time, to be weak in fortune, it maketh a kind of disproportion, between honor and means.”

A popular modern day essayist is Barbara Kingsolver. Her book, “Small Wonders,” is full of essays describing her thoughts and experiences both at home and around the world. Her intention with her essays is to make her readers think about various social issues, mainly concerning the environment and how people treat each other. The link below is to an essay in which a child in an Iranian village she visited had disappeared. The boy was found three days later in a bear’s cave, alive and well, protected by a mother bear. She uses a narrative essay to tell her story.

VI. Examples of Essays in Pop Culture

Many rap songs are basically mini essays, expressing outrage and sorrow over social issues today, just as the 1960s had a lot of anti-war and peace songs that told stories and described social problems of that time. Any good song writer will pay attention to current events and express ideas in a creative way.

A well-known essay written in 1997 by Mary Schmich, a columnist with the Chicago Tribune, was made into a popular video on MTV by Baz Luhrmann. Schmich’s thesis is to wear sunscreen, but she adds strong advice with supporting details throughout the body of her essay, reverting to her thesis in the conclusion.

VII. Related Terms

Research paper.

Research papers follow the same basic format of an essay. They have an introductory paragraph, the body, and a conclusion. However, research papers have strict guidelines regarding a title page, header, sub-headers within the paper, citations throughout and in a bibliography page, the size and type of font, and margins. The purpose of a research paper is to explore an area by looking at previous research. Some research papers may include additional studies by the author, which would then be compared to previous research. The point of view is an objective third-person. No opinion is allowed. Any claims must be backed up with research.

VIII. Conclusion

Students dread hearing that they are going to write an essay, but essays are one of the easiest and most relaxed types of writing they will learn. Mastering the essay will make research papers much easier, since they have the same basic structure. Many historical events can be better understood through essays written by people involved in those times. The continuation of essays in today’s times will allow future historians to understand how our new world of technology and information impacted us.

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What Makes an Essay American

About a month ago, on a trip to Dallas, Texas, I had dinner with a young d.j. whose renown as a producer and engineer is steadily growing. We talked about life and music and art and money, and how he’d arrived at this juncture in his still-short career. Out of the blue, he asked me what I thought about the pastor and televangelist T. D. Jakes, whose megachurch, The Potter’s House, is located in Dallas. I hedged, said something about how Jakes—whose books and cassettes and, later, DVDs littered the bookshelves and bedside tables of the apartments I grew up in—has long struck me as a religious corollary to Oprah Winfrey, a vaguely more devout avatar of that now-pervasive gospel of good feeling and well-directed energy.

“I love him,” the d.j. said, with surprising conviction, and I couldn’t help but ask why.

His appreciation, it turned out, was born of a kind of artistic recognition. He loves to listen to preachers, he said, because a great sermon is like a great d.j. set. Each achieves its purpose via a slowly but strategically earned trust. At a party, this is straightforward: you play familiar songs at the outset, stuff certain to get the crowd moving and on your side. If, later on, you plan to play anything newer, or headier, or more esoteric, you’ll need this reservoir of goodwill. The preacher makes a similar calculation—those first tentative movements away from the safety of the text and into the wilds of exegesis and analysis need to be friendly, kind, “relatable.” Any hope of sneaking in some bold or challenging theological notion, or moral proposition, rests on the benignity of this initial encounter.

This made me think about what I do for a living. After all, the essay, in its American incarnation, is a direct outgrowth of the sermon: argumentative, insistent, not infrequently irritating. Americans, in my observation—and despite our fetish for the beauties of individuality and personal freedom—are always, however smilingly, trying to convince somebody, somewhere, of something, and our essayistic tradition bears this out.

Consider, as just one recent example, Claire Vaye Watkins’s essay “ On Pandering ,” published online by Tin House last November and discussed heatedly for weeks, even months, thereafter. Watkins begins by innocuously, if with a bit of bite, describing the ruralia that surrounds Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where, “until recently,” as she writes, she taught at Bucknell University. She invites readers to think of Lewisburg as the convergence of a tripartite Venn diagram: “label circle #1 Amish country, label circle #2 coal country, label circle #3 fracking country.”

“During the time I lived in central Pennsylvania,” she writes, “the adjective I used most to describe the place to faraway friends was ‘murdersome.’ ” So far, so charmingly free of argument. Then Watkins weaves an insight about the inherent falsity of the college town—the feeling one gets of its having been created for students and their parents, as a kind of “country-mouse theme park”—into a sly statement of her theme: “I lived in a landscape of pandering.”

Then comes a cascade of anecdotes: a humiliating, sexist run-in with the literary “P. T. Barnum figure” Stephen Elliott; a quick history of what Watkins describes as a youthful pastime: “watching boys do stuff”; and then, least convincingly, her own epiphany that smoking pot might be more dangerous for a non-white friend than for her. Each story inches the reader closer to an understanding of what worries Watkins, what she at first searchingly fingers, and then, with gathering directness, fights against: that “the white supremacist patriarchy determines what I write.” By the essay’s end, Watkins has shrugged off any pretense of disinterest or mere observational curiosity, instead offering “some ideas” that gather a force akin to the preacher’s fire. It is impossible to read the essay’s last sentence—“Let us burn this motherfucking system to the ground and build something better”—without hearing a raised voice, or a chorus of answering amens.

It’s important to note that Watkins first delivered “On Pandering” as a speech, at Tin House ’ s Summer Writers’ Workshop. The document’s shift in purpose, from one-time rhetorical set-piece to widely disseminated tract, is reminiscent of Ralph Waldo Emerson, to whose famous addresses—secular sermons without exception—every American essayist, for good or ill, owes one thing or another. Emerson’s prose style could only have been developed out loud, and for the purpose of persuading (or, at least, entertaining) an audience—he careens back and forth in playful, liquid, rollicking sentences of varying lengths; he runs cool, then hot, then affectedly bored, sometimes within the space of a single phrase. He’s pushy, impulsive, impetuous, self-refuting, sort of causelessly rebellious and irreverent. If the Internet sometimes seems sodden with argument and counter-argument, with provocation enough to stretch on beyond the death of the republic (which, granted, hasn’t seemed that far off, lately), this, Emerson’s essays remind us, is nothing new.

As much as one might wish to lay claim to the sensibility of, say, Montaigne—the ruminative philosopher’s ideal, the notion of the essay as neutral attempt—most of us Americans are Emersons: artful sermonizers, pathological point-makers, turntablists spinning the hits with future mischief in mind.

Toward the end of the introduction to his latest anthology, “The Making of the American Essay,” published earlier this year, the essay-evangelist John D’Agata recounts the creation myth of the Cahto, a Native American people indigenous to coastal California. The world, in their telling, was meticulously constructed by two deities and then arbitrarily washed away by an enormous flood. “But before they reconstruct the world they lost in their creation story,” D’Agata writes, “the Cahto make a point of lingering on the details of the flood’s devastation, noting how it methodically disassembled the world around them by erasing each part of it, piece by piece by piece: the mountains, trees, birds, people, weather, dirt, and light.” D’Agata reads this chronicle of annihilation as a celebration of nothingness itself, an indication of the excitement of the artist before a blank canvas—in the presence of pure potential. Into this void steps the essay, situated as it is “between the given and the made.” The world, he says, “provides nonfiction, and humans provide the rest.” This—“the rest”—is D’Agata’s definition of the essay, which leaves him room to trace the genre’s American flowering with a striking, and, in the end, unconvincing, breadth.

D’Agata’s liberties are legion: “Blood Burning Moon,” a fictional sketch from Jean Toomer’s modernist work “Cane,” appears in the anthology; so does “The Whiteness of the Whale,” a chapter from “Moby-Dick”; so does “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso,” a poem by Gertrude Stein. None of these is an essay, and D’Agata’s insistence on recasting them—and, in so doing, flouting the interests and intentions of their creators—is evidence of the flawed idea that underpins his effort. Just as telling is the inclusion of harmless belletristic exercises from artists otherwise known for their pugilistic talents. James Baldwin, the most preacherly American writer of the past century, is represented by his pleasant but ultimately aimless recounting of a fight between Floyd Patterson and Sonny Liston. Renata Adler, whose lethal essayistic style is best indicated by her famous excoriation of Pauline Kael, appears by way of “Brownstone,” which, again, is not an essay but rather a short story ( first published in The New Yorker ) that appeared in “Speedboat,” Adler’s first novel, as a vignette. Emerson’s “Nature” is rightly present, as is one of its direct precursors, Jonathan Edwards’s sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”—but amid so much fiddling around, so many exceptions that prove the rule of our nonfiction tradition, the importance and lasting influence of these foundational texts is lost.

All of this has to do with D’Agata’s career-long intellectual project, which has been to “radically redefine” the essay—that phrase is from a recent interview, published in Guernica —by deëmphasizing the form’s fealty to fact , and, instead, insisting on its status as art for art’s sake, equal in its florid otherworldliness to any novel or poem. In the same interview, explaining the apolitical eccentricity of his compilations (“The Making of the American Essay” marks the completion of a triptych, together comprising what he calls a “New History” of the form), D’Agata speaks of his desire to “divorce the essay from being read exclusively as a form that’s tied to its subject matter, or that is propelled by its subject matter.” But what, really, can this mean? Writing is communication, and form is only meaningful—only artful—insofar as it aids and inflects the travel of a thought from one mind to the next. What is literature without the propulsion of a subject: fallen king, Grecian urn, eaten plums, or national travesty? What D’Agata describes, and what “The Making of the American Essay” presents—form unbothered by the roilings of the world, the essay untethered from its fiery American roots—is a beautiful house, unfurnished forever. Nothing political, provocative, or argumentative breaches his walls, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that little fun does, either.

Of course, the relationship between idea and expressive vehicle is looser, if not quite nonexistent, in other arts, especially the visual ones—often excitingly so. It’s interesting, then, to observe the steadily increasing prominence of frankly polemical work within the walls of the museum. In a recent essay, for New York magazine , on how identity politics have come to “constitute a real aesthetic movement,” on the same scale of art-historical significance as Impressionism or Cubism, the art critic Jerry Saltz recalls the still-settling impact of the “so-called multi-cultural, identity-politics, political, or just bad” Whitney Biennial of 1993. The show—which was helped into the world by Thelma Golden , now the director of the Studio Museum in Harlem—featured commentary on contemporary troubles such as the Rodney King beating and the AIDS crisis, and, along the way, earned the ire of the critical class. Saltz regards the show as ground zero in the creation of today’s artistic culture, in which “biography, history, the plight of the marginalized, institutional politics, context, sociologies, anthropologies, and privilege have all been recognized as ‘forms,’ ‘genres,’ and ‘materials’ in art.”

One way to see this sea change is as a final rebuke of later Modernism’s tendency toward solipsistic enclosure: there is, after all, a point beyond which a painting about paintings about painting becomes a symptom of the world’s absurdity, not a tonic or a refuge. Another way to see it is that our visual art has become more essayistic in nature—which is to say: sermonic, assertive, usefully relevant to a polity ever more prone to the bizarre . Perhaps more artists have realized what becomes apparent after leafing through “The Making of the American Essay”: that conflict is elemental to America and to its creative expression; that a well-crafted argument is art, not its opposite; that beautiful, harmless things are best left on the shelf and out of reach; that the more fiercely—and, yes, sometimes annoyingly—our sensibilities clash, the better off our country might be.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Realism and Naturalism

Introduction, general overviews.

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• In the Context of US History
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Realism and Naturalism by John Dudley LAST REVIEWED: 29 August 2012 LAST MODIFIED: 29 August 2012 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0059

Variously defined as distinct philosophical approaches, complementary aesthetic strategies, or broad literary movements, realism and naturalism emerged as the dominant categories applied to American fiction of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Included under the broad umbrella of realism are a diverse set of authors, including Henry James, W. D. Howells, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, George Washington Cable, Rebecca Harding Davis, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Hamlin Garland. Often categorized as regionalists or local colorists, many of these writers produced work that emphasized geographically distinct dialects and customs. Others offered satirical fiction or novels of manners that exposed the excesses, hypocrisies, or shortcomings of a culture undergoing radical social change. A subsequent generation of writers, including Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, and Jack London, are most often cited as the American inheritors of the naturalist approach practiced by Emile Zola, whose 1880 treatise Le Roman Experimental applied the experimental methods of medical science to the construction of the novel. Governed by a combination of heredity, environment, and chance, the typical characters of naturalist fiction find themselves constrained from achieving the transcendent goals suggested by a false ideology of romantic individualism. Over the past century, critics and literary historians have alternately viewed realist and naturalist texts as explicit condemnations of the economic, cultural, or ethical deficiencies of the industrialized age or as representations of the very ideological forces they purport to critique. Accordingly, an exploration of these texts raises important questions about the relationship between literature and society, and about our understanding of the “real” or the “natural” as cultural and literary phenomena. Though of little regard in the wake of the New Critics’ emphasis on metaphysics and formal innovation, a revived interest in realism as the American adaptation of an international movement aligned with egalitarian and democratic ideology emerged in the 1960s, as did an effort to redefine naturalist fiction as a more complex form belonging to the broader mainstream of American literary history. More recently, the emergence of deconstructive, Marxist, and new historicist criticism in the 1980s afforded a revised, and often skeptical, reevaluation of realism and naturalism as more conflicted forms, itself defined or constructed by hegemonic forces and offering insight into late-19th- and early-20th-century ideologies of class, race, and gender.

In the wake of Parrington’s attempt to reconcile the rise of realism and naturalism with an essentially romantic tradition ( Parrington 1930 ), interest in the rise of these movements has occurred in waves. In particular, efforts to provide large-scale summaries reflect the attention to social problems in 1960s, and the influence of—and reaction to—post-structuralism and cultural criticism in the 1980s. In all cases, however, comprehensive hypotheses about the nature of realism and naturalism remain grounded, to a large extent, in the political, economic, and cultural history of the late 19th century. Berthoff 1965 , Pizer 1984 , and Lehan 2005 represent attempts to accommodate the horizons established by Parrington’s definition of the study of literary form. Kaplan 1988 , Borus 1989 , and Bell 1993 each make valuable contributions to the new historicist reexamination of naturalism. Murphy 1987 offers one of the few comprehensive accounts of realism within dramatic literature.

Bell, Michael Davitt. The Problem of American Realism: Studies in the Cultural History of a Literary Idea . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Provides compelling readings of the canonical authors, suggesting little common ground beyond the fact that both realism and naturalism explicitly reject the conventional dictates of artistry and dominant notions of style. Unified in their attraction to “reality” as an abstraction, Howells, Twain, James, Norris, Crane, Dreiser, and Jewett each constructed radically unique responses to a common “revolt against style” (p. 115)

Berthoff, Warner. The Ferment of Realism: American Literature, 1884–1919 . New York: Free Press, 1965.

Suggests that realism as a category may be best understood though an examination of practice, rather than through the study of principles or theories. In this light, establishes forceful reading of realist novels as varied statements of outrage and opposition to the increasing materialism, disorder, and perceived moral decay in the years leading up to World War I.

Borus, Daniel H. Writing Realism: Howells, James, and Norris in the Mass Market . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.

Draws on concerns of new historicism, yet emphasizes the process of literary publication and reception itself. Explores Howells, James, and Norris in detail, with some attention to other writers, including compelling discussions of the publishing industry, literary celebrity, and rise of the political novel.

Kaplan, Amy. The Social Construction of American Realism . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Includes a concise summary of earlier critical debates about realism (including and subsuming naturalism) and describes the cultural work in novels of Howells, Wharton, and Dreiser to construct social spaces that contain and defuse class tensions emerging in the late 19th century. Among the more influential new historicist interventions.

Lehan, Richard Daniel. Realism and Naturalism: The Novel in an Age of Transition . Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005.

Resolutely formalist overview of realism and naturalism as literary modes. Describes the philosophical and cultural assumptions that helped shape these movements and traces their development throughout the 20th century. At times polemical in its dismissal of post-structuralist or materialist rereadings (see, for example, Kaplan 1988 ; Howard 1985 or Michaels 1987 , both cited under Philosophy, History, and Form ), nonetheless immensely useful and readable synthesis of key ideas.

Murphy, Brenda. American Realism and American Drama, 1880–1940 . New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

A treatment of realism in American theater, tracing the development of realist ideas about dramatic representation and their subsequent influence on American dramatists of the 20th century, including Eugene O’Neill, Elmer Rice, and others. Addresses the scant attention paid to the theater in the scholarship on realism.

Parrington, Vernon Louis. The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America, 1860–1920 . Vol. 3, Main Currents in American Thought . New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930.

Though left incomplete at Parrington’s death, offers what would become the dominant view of realism and naturalism for much subsequent criticism. Sees these movements as antitheses of idealism represented by the Emersonian tradition, providing a needed corrective to “shoddy romanticism” that threatened to consume the American literary tradition.

Pizer, Donald. Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature . Rev. ed. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984.

Revision of essential 1966 work, offering a comprehensive formal theory of realism and naturalism, linked by adherence to an ethical idealism that informs, restructures, and complicates the diversity of themes and topics, the often bleak subject matter, and the presence of a deterministic worldview. Collects a variety of essays that construct a coherent portrait of the movements and their defining tensions.

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