American literature

TOWARDS A NATIONAL LITERATURE

Chronology :

- 1773 : Boston Tea Party

- 1776 : Declaration of Independence
- 1789 : George Washington President
- 1791 : Bill of Rights
- 1801 : Thomas Jefferson President
- 1831 : Nat Turner leads slave insurrection
- 1839 : Liberty Party founded by Abolitionists
- 1840 : Poe, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque
- 1841 : Emerson, Essays
- 1846 : Assertion of “Manifest Destiny”
- 1849 : Thoreau, Civil Disobedience
- 1850 : Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
- 1851 : Melville, Moby Dick
- 1855 : Whitman, Leaves of Grass
- 1859 : Colorado gold rush
- 1860 : Confederation of the Southern States
- 1861 : Abraham Lincoln President
- 1861 : Secession of Southern States
- 1863 : Emancipation Proclamation
- 1865 : End of the Civil War ; Slavery abolished (13th amendment)

Political and social background

The New Republic

- End 18th century : growth of Enlightenment

- Belief in social progress and in the power of “the people” at the basis of the
Revolutionary War
- Controversy between Federalists and Republicans // Constitution : ideological debate
between the optimists (followers of Locke and Rousseau) who saw human nature as
good and capable of improving if left free, ans the pessimists (followers of Hobbes)
who believed in the need for a strong centralized government

The 19th century : a growing nation

- Rapid expansion
- 1800 – 1865 : population increased from 5M to 36M inhabitants (immigrants from
Ireland, Western Europe and Scandinavia)
- Frontier gradually pushed to the Great Plains and the Pacific
- The Western states were beginning to play an important role
- Discovery of gold in California en 1868
- Belief in “manifest destiny” (idea that the territorial expansion of the US was the will
of God)
- All this seemed to justify the killing of Native Americans
 - The vastness of the land and the sense of place it led to were among the greatest
sources of inspiration for American literature, requiring a specific language to convey
its grandeur and awe
- The US were gradually turning into an urban and industrial sociey
- Railroad, steamboat, telegraph, cotton gin
- Factory population in the North
- Gap between the rich and the poor

Conflicts of conscience

- Religious revivals
- Evangelical Protestant churches (Methodists, Baptists)
- Humanitarian societies defending prison reform, women’s rights, public education
- Utopian communities (Brook Farm)
- Debates on the relationship individual-community (cf. Whitman, Leaves of Grass)
- Slavery : moral, social and economic issue
- Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), powerful condemnation of the
system
- “House divided against itself” (Lincoln); country split between Northern and Southern
states

Main trends in literature

- Federal age : classicism of Rome and Athens

- Plain and clear writing
- 1828 : American Dictionary of the English Language, Noah Webster
- It took a long time for the US to shake off its cultural subservience to Britain in spite
of its longing for literary independence and spiritual identity
- 1837, Emerson’s The American Scholar condemned foreign cultural domination and
announced American Renaissance
- Formality began to give way to the praise of feelings and emotions; wild nature and
primitive man became objects of interest
- Cultural patriotism (Transcendentalists, Hudson River School)
- Influence of Gothic
- Era of individualists and prophets
- Altough writers such as Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson and Thoreau had an enormous
impact on the generations to come, they were not fully appreciated by their
contemporaries

The New Republic

- Political writings : Paine, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison

- Autobiographies : Benjamin Franklin
- The Connecticut Wits : neoclassical poets, Federalist and Calvinist ideas

The Preromantics

- Travel narrative : St John de Crèvecœur’s Letters from an American Farmer

Romanticism and the American Renaissance

- The Knickerbockers, group of writers based in New York, wanted to explore truly
American themes
- Transcendentalism, reaction against materialism and conformity of American religion
and society, celebration of feelings, nature and the goodness of the “Oversoul” :
Emerson’s Nature (1836), The American Scholar (1837) and Self-Reliance (1841);
Thoreau’s Walden (1854) and Civil Disobedience (1849)
- The American Renaissance : sombre in tone, highly symbolic and imaginative :
Poe’s Tales (1845); Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850); Melville’s Moby Dick
(1851)
- Prophetic poetry of Whitman : Leaves of Grass (1855)
- The Schoolroom or Household Poets : melancholy, moralistic, folklore

WALT WHITMAN (1819 – 1892)

- Self-educated
- Journalist
- Defender of the Democratic Party
- 1855, Leaves of Grass
- Shocked most Americans by its celebration of the human body and sexuality and by
its flouting of all literary convetions
- Influenced by Transcendentalism
- Presence of the divine in nature, objects and human beings alike
- Celebrates nature, the self, sexual freedom
- Interest in science and Darwinian evolution
- Leaves of Grass is also the epic of America
- Rhythm often rhapsodic and incantatory, reminiscent of the Psalms

RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803 – 1882)

- Unitarian pastor in Boston

- Resigned in 1832
- Travelled to Europe
- Centre of the “Transcendentalists”
- Popular lectures
- Respected as an American prophet and sage
- Optimistic philosophy based on self-reliance, moral idealism, personal responsibility
and the need to return to nature
- Nature (1836) : correspondences between all aspects of the universe, unity of the
divinity beneath the diversity of existence
- Nature provided beauty and moral truth
- Transcendental intuition as a means of reaching truth
- The American Scholar (1837) was a plea for cultural rejuvenation and literary
independence
- Self-Reliance (1841) advocated romantic individualism based on the belief that each
soul is divine
- The Poet (1844) : poem // plant (organic, no rigid rules) + poet divinely inspired
THE AGE OF REALISM : 1865-1915

Chronology :

1865-77: Reconstruction
1866 : 14th Amendment (US citizenship); Ku Klux Klan organized
1876 : Bell invents the telephone ; Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
1879 : Edison invents the light bulb
1881 : Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
1884 : Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
1885 : first skycraper in Chicago
1890 : Ellis Island becomes immigration depot
1891 : Populist party formed
1898 : Spanish-American War
1905 : Wharton, The House of Mirth
1907 : Peak immigration year (1,285,000 immigrants)
1908 : Ford’s Model T
1915 : Sinking of the Lusitania
1917 : USA declares war on Germany

Political and social background

- First decades after the Civil War : expansion ; railways ; steamboats ; light bulb ; car ;
aeroplane
- Between 1860 and 1900, the population of the USA doubled from 40 to 80 million
- New waves of immigrants
- Country increasingly urbanized
- Spirit of endless speculation ; economic growth ; religion preached the gospell of
wealth : “ I say get rich, get rich ! ” (Rev. Conwell)
- 1880s : acquisitiveness, materialism, “ Big Business ” ; spiritual scepticism ; unrest ;
huge social inequalities
- Proletariat ; new immigrants ; former black slaves ; financial crises ; corruption in the
gouvernment
- Vulgarity and superficial glitter ; the  “ Gilded Age ” (Mark Twain)
- There were also considerable social gains ; most of the Populists aims had been
achieved by 1914 ; the level of literacy was improving ; literature was becoming more
popular
- Puritan ethic of hard work ; Social Darwinism (Herbert Spencer) ; justify competition
and profit, reconcile democracy and personal success ; capitalism ; myth of the self-
made man ; concept of a “ struggle for life ”

Main trends in literature

- New interest in the representation of unidealized reality

- Observation of rural and urban society
- Criticism of the excess of capitalism
- Increasingly militant literature ; its aim was to expose, to judge
Regionalist or “Local Colour” fiction

- Regionalist writing emphasized local colour and the particular characteristics of a

region
- Myth of the small town ; nationalism
- The descriptions of the settings, manners and dialects expressed the fresh concern with
authenticity
- Mark Twain, with his description of Mississippi life, is the best-known representative
of this group ; his novels develop the humour and story-telling methods of his frontier
South, but also condemn slavery, hipocrisy, and all pretension

Realism and naturalism

- Realism came to America from Europe (Balzac, Flaubert, Tolstoy) as a reaction

against the sentimental, idealized mode of the earlier generation
- In the last decade of the century, realism became starker and turned to naturalism with
its Darwinist view that heredity and environment determine people’s lives
- Jack London was an active socialist. His novels (The Call of the Wild, 1903) show
people and animals struggling against their environment, trying to adapt. He was
influenced by Nietzsche, who inspired some of his “supermen”.

Psychological realism

- A few writers turned to inner realism

- Henry James focuses on the perception and development of consciousness, replacing
the omniscient narrator with the limited point of view of a “reflector”
- Edith Wharton’s novels show the influence of determinisme in their study of
characters influenced by their environment, and are harsh criticisms of the society of
her time. But she also focused on the psychological analysis of women’s longings and
aspirations

MARK TWAIN (1835-1910)

- Samuel Langhorne Clemens

- Mississippi River
- He left school before he was twelve
- Adventurous life
- Pen name : Mark Twain
- At the end of the century : death of his wife and daughters; bankruptcy
- He is left embittered and lonely
- Increasingly pessimistic tone of his work
- Breaking away from the genteel tradition
- Simple people; dialect and slang; vernacular
- Twain’s masterpiece : sequel of Tom Sawyer (1876), Huckleberry Finn (1884) : novel
of initiation which relates the adventures of Huck, who runs away with Jim, his black
fugitive friend; humorous adventures down the Mississippi River
- Satire on Southern society; reflection on morality and manners
- Nostalgic realism combined with romanticism; innocence with experience; comedy
with tragic awareness
- Later works : increasingly satirical; Swiftian vision of the human race as hypocritical
 - HENRY JAMES (1843-1916)

- Born in New York City

- Wealthy family of intellectuals
- Father philosopher and theologian
- Brother, William, psychologist and philosopher of pragmatism
- Harvard Law School; lost interest in the law and started writing fiction
- Settled in England in 1875; took up British nationality in 1915
- Attracted by European culture which contrasted with the vulgarity of America’s
“Gilden Age”
- Sophisticated characters
- Contrasts between the world of social conventions and that of the artists
- Innocence vs corrpution; materialism vs art; vitality vs decay
- Often symbolized by an innocent American girl in Europe
- Influenced by Flaubert and Turgenev
- Master of form; inner realism; technique close to the stream of consciousness
- Sensitive and intelligent characters who reflect what they see and feel

EDITH WHARTON (1862-1937)

- Wealthy and socially prominent New York family

- Privately educated
- Married Edward Wharton in 1885
- Lived in the life of a society matron
- 1900 : husband mentally ill
- Settled in France in 1907
- Divorce in 1913
- From 1900 she became a writer of novels and short stories
- The setting of her novels is cosmopolitan (cf. Henry James)
- Main interest : conflicts between individual ambitions and social conventions
- Desintegration of fashionable society
- Arrival of “nouveaux riches”
- The House of Mirth (1905) : conflict between the poor orphan Lily Bart and the rigid
conventions of society as she tries to secure a rich husband
- The Age of Innocence (1920) : relationships between the young lawyer Newland
Archer, his fiancée, May Welland, and May’s exotic cousin Ellen Olenska; conflict
between duty and aspiration

THE 20TH CENTURY : 1915-1945

- 1915 : Sinking of the Lusitania

- 1918 : USA declares war on Germany
- 1918 : Armistice signed; beginning of the “Red Scare”
- 1919 : 18th Amendment institutes prohibition
- 1920 : 19th Amendment gives women the vote; Wharton, The Age of Innocence
- 1925 : Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
- 1929 : Wall Street crash; Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
- 1933 : Roosevelt; 18th Amendment repealed; New Deal; drought
- 1939 : Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
 - 1940 : Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
- 1941 : Pearl Harbor
- 1944 : Allied landing in Normandy
- 1945 : Yalta Conference; Germany surrenders; Hiroshima

Social and political background

- America’s involvement in the First World War : sense of betrayal and absurdity
- Following decade : business boom; pleasure-seeking and self-centered generation
- Radio, telephone, movies, Ford “Tin Lizzy”
- Decade of huge material consumption; advertising; credit; speculation; individualism;
big business
- Arts; skycrapers; jazz music; changes in manners and morals; Jazz Age : liberation
and dissipation; women obtained the vote in 1920
- “Roaring Twenties” : aimlessness and disenchantment of a post-war generation,
cynical and devoid of faith or valus
- Increasingly xenophobic America, limits on immigration, Klu Klux Klan
- Narrow-minded : prohibition, contraband, Fundamentalist Christian sects, banning of
Darwinist teaching
- Many writers of the “Lost Generation” thus condemned conformity, provincialism, the
lack of faith and ideals, the meaninglessness and alienation (T. S. Eliot, The Waste
Land)
- 1930s : social awareness and commitment
- The stock market crash turned the American Dream into a myth
- Social hardship, lack of a welfare program, drought
- 1933 : Roosevelt, New Deal
- 1935 : WPA (Works Progress Administration) : offers employment to some two
million writers, painters, musicians and other artists
- Slow recovery, bad economic context, worry caused by the rise of Fascism in Europe
led the American writers to reappraise their values
- Many, such as Steinbeck or Dos Passos, looked towards Communism
- Abrupt end of the literary renaissance in 1941 (Pearl Harbor, Second World War)

Main trends in literature

- Early decade of the 20th century : deep change in literature, new forms of expression to
convey the chaotic nature of reality
- World War I, theories of Freud, Einstein
- Increasing emphasis on perception and subjectivity

Fiction
The Lost Generation
- The expatriate American writers who lived in Paris in the 1920s and reflected on the
post-war sense of emptiness and loss
- New literary forms
- Hemingway : major stylistic innovator; use of spare, controlled, understated prose to
portray the lives of his haunted but stoic heroes. Courage in the face of absurdity when
confronted with suffering and death
- F. S. Fitzgerald : morals and manners of the glittering Jazz Age; heroes who search in
vain for the American Dream; endless quest for pleasure and wealth; loss of illusions
 Social awareness
- 1929 crash : unemployment
- Proletarian heroes, collective novels of Steinbeck or Dos Passos
- John Steinbeick : novels set in California; contrast between the evils of society and the
ideal redemptive virtues of courage, solidarity, and love

A new Southern literature

- In a need to assert its identity, the South turned back to its past with feelings of both
guilt (slavery, corruption) and nostalgia (former genteel way of life)
- Frustrated and grotesque beings, obsessed by perversion and violence
- William Faulkner : dark novels, tragic tales of incest, rape and madness, illustrating
the degeneracy of Southern dynasties; stream-of-consciousness techniques, interior
monologue, long and complex sentences to convey the rich experience of his tragic
characters

FRANCIS SCOTT FITZGERALD (1896-1940)

- Born in St. Paul, Minnesota

- Succes of his first novel
- Marries Zelda Sayre
- Decade-long life of extravagance and flamboyant parties
- Kept writing stories about the Jazz Age
- His life paralleled the collapse of the country in the 1930s : Zelda’s insanity and his
own depression and alcoholism
- Chronicler of his age : glamour and disillusionment, hollow glitter, sense of despair
and tragedy which accompanies wealth and success; money is so idealized that it
becomes synonymous with love, beauty and youth, but the very perfection of the
dream makes it unattainable
- The Great Gatsby : the life of the very rich on Long Island; use o a narrator, Nick
Carraway, who is simultaneously involved in the action and detached from it; Nick
portrays Gatsby as a pretentious and vulgar nouveau riche; however he is redeemed by
his idealism, his enduring wish to recpature Daisy, to make dreams come true; Gatsby
becomes a tragic hero and his idealism stands for the American Dream
- Tender is the Night : story of a psychiatrist who falls in love with one of his wealthy
patiens; partly autobiographical; chronicles of the life of the expatriate rich in Europe

ERNEST HEMINGWAY (1899-1961)

- Born in Chicago
- Settled in Paris after World War I
- Reporter, involved in action all through his life
- Nobel prize in 1954
- Committed suicide in 1961
- In a world of despair and nothingness (“nada”), the only thing that matters is to face
pain with dignity and self-discipline (“grace under pressure”) in order to impose some
order on chaos
- Self-discipline is also involved in the process of writing : spare and minimalist prose,
simple sentences, few adjectives and many repetitionss. Detached point of view and
understated feelings
 - For Whom the Bell Tolls : sacrifice of an American academic, Robert Jordan, for the
lost cause of some peasant guerillas during the Spanish Civil War
- The Old Man and the Sea : symbolice and parable-like novel about the endurance of
an old fisherman struggling to bring home a huge marlin he has caught

WILLIAM FAULKNER (1897-1962)

- William Falkner (he added the “u” when he started to publish)

- Distinguished Southern family
- Dreams of a glorious past
- He spent most of his life in the small town of Oxford, Mississippi
- Nobel prize for literature in 1950
- Fiction set in the imaginary town of Jefferson
- Main theme : the loss of ideals after the heroic South was ruined by slavery,
corruption and money; past viewed with a mixture of nostalgia and guilt
- South described as prey to violence, rape, incest and murder
- Beyond the South, Faulkner’s fiction is about what he described as “love and honor
and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice”
- The Sound and the Fury : decay of the “old” Southern aristocracy through rhe
Compson family’s failure to come to terms with modern life
- Experimental novels; interior monologues, stream-of-consciousness techniques,
multiple points of view, dislocation of narrative time; long, involved and fluid
sentences which convey the continuum of life in all its richness, complexity and
ambiguity; rich vocabulary, combines dialect with coinages, abstract words with rare
archaisms

JOHN STEINBECK (1902-1968)

- born in Salinas, California

- reporter during World War II
- Nobel prize in 1962
- Writer’s role : “to satirize the silliness of society, to attack its injustices, to stigmatize
it faults”
- Portrays all those who remained outside of the realm of material success: the migrants
and Mexican workers, the misfits, the illiterate and the oppressed
- Tragedies of the Depression years exposed with scientific naturalism
- His novels are also pastoral, imbued with nostalgia for a primitive and simple life
peopled with idealized characters who embody essential human values
- Of Mice and Men : about the frienship between two migrant workers and their Edenic
dream of possessing a little bit of land
- The Grapes of Wrath : Steinbeck’s masterpiece which best illustrates the Great
Depression; a novel about the migration of the dispossessed Okies from the Dust Bowl
of Oklahoma to California; their journey evokes the pioneers, Biblical exodus, the
American Dream; leads to desillusionment and exploitation; epic of love and sacrifice;
Tom Joad learns about the need of countering the tyranny of mechanization and
capitalism
- Often lyrical prose; shows the influence of folk tales in its use of repetition and rythm
THE 20TH CENTURY : AFTER WORLD WAR II

- 1947 : Cold War (Truman Doctrine)

- 1952 : Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
- 1953 : Rosenbergs executed for espionage; Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain
- 1953 : McCarthy hearings
- 1955 : Nabokov, Lolita
- 1956 : Montgomery (Alabama) bus boycott
- 1957 : School desegregation enforced in Little Rock; Kerouac, On the Road
- 1958 : NASA
- 1960 : Kennedy
- 1961 : Heller, Catch-22
- 1964 : Civil rights Act voted; Escalation of the war in Vietnam
- 1966 : Capote, In Cold Blood
- 1968 : Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinated
- 1969 : First landing on the moon; Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint
- 1972 : Watergate break-in
- 1981 : Reagan
- 1987 : Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities
- 1989 : Auster, Moon Palace
- 1990 : Golf War
- 1993 : Clinton
- 1998 : Monicagate scandal
- 2000 : Roth, The Human Stain
- 2001 : Terrorist attacks against New York and Washington
- 2003 : War against Irak
- 2008 : Financial crisis; Obama

Literature and society

- Absurdity of World War II expressed in Heller’s Catch-22

- 1950s : Cold War and its Manichean vision of the world
- Many voices (Beat Generation) rose to condemn the dwarfing of the individual by
materialism, centralized government and the power of the media
- 1960s-70s : protest and rebellion; political and social awareness, “sexual revolution”,
LSD; huge success of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (psychiatric
hospital); appearance of “new journalism”, fiction halfway between reporting and
imagining
- End of the 1970s : era of disillusionment; literature became more self-absorbed and
narcissistic as a whole generation abandoned engagement to focus on status, money
and a culture dominated by technology and the media
- Post World War II literature : diversity of themes, voices, styles and technique
- Minorities, ethnic communities
- Experiments, “death of the novel”
- Growing gap between the mass, popular culture and the more experimental art and
literature
Main trends in literature

Poetry

- The Beat Generation : looked for intense moments of experience, influenced by drugs
or oriental meditation
- The Projectivists : kind of free verse in which the poet projects himself through lines
which correspond to breathing units
- The New York School : influenced by European modernist experimentation and
surrealism
- Confessional poets : return to a more lyrical and intimate voice

The theatre

- Tennesse Williams, Arthur Miller : plays about individuals crushed by materialism

and conformity

Fiction

- The Beat Generation : rebellion against the mainstream values and culture of America;
search for the fulfilment of the self through religious ecstasy, visionary states and the
use of drugs
- The flowering of Southern literature : tradition of introspection, themes of dark
passions and evil deeds (Harper Lee, Flannery O’Connor, Truman Capote, J. C. Oates)
- The search for identity : minorities : Black voices (Ralph Ellison, Baldwin, Toni
Morrison); Jewish voices (Heller, Bellow, Roth); Women’s voices
- Neorealism and nonfiction : books which report and comment on reality : Truman
Capote, Tom Wolfe…
- The novel of manners : life and manners of a given social milieu; J. D. Salinger,
Truman Capote, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer…
- From parody to absurdity : parody, burlesque, farce and absurdity to mock the
conventions of the novel and convey the meaninglessness and chaos of society;
fragmentation, pastiche, collage, illusion, word games : defamiliarization (Nabokov,
Heller, Auster…)

VLADIMIR NABOKOV (1899 – 1977)

- Born in Russia
- Cambridge university
- Berlin
- Paris
- United Sates (1940)
- Decided to write in English and become an American citizen
- Switzerland (1959)
- Fiction concerned with the deceptive and illusory nature of things
- Words become objects in themselves, not just a way of expressing meaning
- Virtuosity and Joycean games
- Central carachters : alienated beings, victims of their obsessions
- Lolita : story of a middle-aged man’s lust for a nymphet, Lolita, of his obsessive
pursuit of her, and of their grotesque odyssey through America
PHILIP ROTH (1933-2018)

- In his novels, middle-class Jewish life is seen as representative of all American life,
and its vacuity, vulgarity, materialism and conformity are treated satirically
- Love, sexuality, family, Jewish identity
- Outrageous irreverence
- Kafkaesque surrealistic treatment
- Narcissism, confession, position of the Jewish writer, boundaries between reality and
fiction, writer and creation
- Goodbye, Columbus : satire of affluent Jewish lige
- Portnoy’s Complaint : morality superseded by narcissism
- My Life as a Man : Roth introduces his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, Jewish writer
- Mastery of the colloquial American speech