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1. History of the Literature
1.1 Literature of the United States
«Anything has beginning and end» said one famous philosopher, like that saying the literature of America has its beginning and this is the history. In this part of work we want to pay attention on American history, what the history have during on the formation of USA.its early history, America was a series of British colonies on the eastern coast of the present-day United States. Therefore, its literary tradition begins as linked to the broader tradition of English literature. However, unique American characteristics and the breadth of its production usually now cause it to be considered a separate path and tradition.
Colonial literature
Some of the earliest American literatures were pamphlets and writings extolling the benefits of the colonies to both a European and colonist audience. John Smith of Jamestown could be considered the first American author with his works: A True Relation of… Virginia… (1608) and The General Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles (1624). Other writers of this manner included Daniel Denton, Thomas Ashe, William Penn, George Percy, William Strachey, John Hammond, Daniel Coxe, Gabriel Thomas, and John Lawson.religious disputes that prompted settlement in America were also topics of early writing. A journal written by John Winthrop discussed the religious foundations of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Edward Winslow also recorded a diary of the first years after the Mayflower's arrival. Other religiously influenced writers included Increase Mather and William Bradford, author of the journal published as a History of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-47. Others like Roger Williams and Nathaniel Ward more fiercely argued state and church separation.poetry also existed. Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor are especially noted. Michael Wigglesworth wrote a best-selling poem, The Day of Doom, describing the time of judgement. Nicholas Noyes was also known for his doggerel verse.early writings described conflicts and interaction with the Indians, as seen in writings by Daniel Gookin, Alexander Whitaker, John Mason, Benjamin Church, and Mary Rowlandson. John Eliot translated the Bible into the Algonquin language.Edwards and Cotton Mather represented the Great Awakening, a religious revival in the early 18th century that asserted strict Calvinism. Other Puritan and religious writers include Thomas Hooker, Thomas Shepard, Uriah Oakes, John Wise, and Samuel Willard. Less strict and serious writers included Samuel Sewall, Sarah Kemble Knight, and William Byrd.revolutionary period also contained political writings, including those by colonists Samuel Adams, Josiah Quincy, John Dickinson, and Joseph Galloway, a loyalist to the crown. Two key figures were Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine. Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac and The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin are esteemed works with their wit and influence toward the formation of a budding American identity. Paine's pamphlet Common Sense and The American Crisis writings are seen as playing a key role in influencing the political tone of the period.the revolution itself, poems and songs such as «Yankee Doodle» and «Nathan Hale» were popular. Major satirists included John Trumbull and Francis Hopkinson. Philip Morin Freneau also wrote important poems about the war's course.
Early U.S. literature
The first American novel is sometimes considered to be William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy (1789). Much of the early literature of the new nation struggled to find a uniquely American voice. European forms and styles were often transferred to new locales and critics often saw them as inferior. For example, Wieland and other novels by Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) are often seen as imitations of the Gothic novels then being written in England.
Unique American style
With the War of 1812 and an increasing desire to produce uniquely American work, a number of key new literary figures appeared, perhaps most prominently Washington Irving, William Cullen Bryant, James Fenimore Cooper, and Edgar Allan Poe. Irving, often considered the first writer to develop a unique American style (although this is debated) wrote humorous works in Salmagundi and the well-known satire A History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809). Bryant wrote early romantic and nature-inspired poetry, which evolved away from their European origins. In 1835, Poe began writing short stories - including The Masque of the Red Death, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Fall of the House of Usher, and The Murders in the Rue Morgue - that explore previously hidden levels of human psychology and push the boundaries of fiction toward mystery and fantasy. Cooper's Leatherstocking tales about Natty Bumppo were popular both in the new country and abroad.writers were also popular and included Seba Smith and Benjamin P. Shillaber in New England and Davy Crockett, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Johnson J. Hooper, Thomas Bangs Thorpe, Joseph G. Baldwin, and George Washington Harris writing about the American frontier.New England Brahmins were a group of writers connected to Harvard University and its seat in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The core included James Russell Lowell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), an ex-minister, published a startling nonfiction work called Nature, in which he claimed it was possible to dispense with organized religion and reach a lofty spiritual state by studying and responding to the natural world. His work influenced not only the writers who gathered around him, forming a movement known as Transcendentalism, but also the public, who heard him lecture.'s most gifted fellow-thinker was perhaps Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), a resolute nonconformist. After living mostly by himself for two years in a cabin by a wooded pond, Thoreau wrote Walden, a book-length memoir that urges resistance to the meddlesome dictates of organized society. His radical writings express a deep-rooted tendency toward individualism in the American character. Other writers influenced by Transcendentalism were Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, George Ripley, Orestes Brownson, and Jones Very.political conflict surrounding Abolitionism inspired the writings of William Lloyd Garrison and his paper The Liberator, along with poet John Greenleaf Whittier and Harriet Beecher Stowe in her world-famous Uncle Tom's Cabin.1837, the young Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) collected some of his stories as Twice-Told Tales, a volume rich in symbolism and occult incidents. Hawthorne went on to write full-length «romances,» quasi-allegorical novels that explore such themes as guilt, pride, and emotional repression in his native New England. His masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter, is the stark drama of a woman cast out of her community for committing adultery. History of modern literature's fiction had a profound impact on his friend Herman Melville (1819-1891), who first made a name for himself by turning material from his seafaring days into exotic novels. Inspired by Hawthorne's example, Melville went on to write novels rich in philosophical speculation. In Moby Dick, an adventurous whaling voyage becomes the vehicle for examining such themes as obsession, the nature of evil, and human struggle against the elements. In another fine work, the short novel Billy Budd, Melville dramatizes the conflicting claims of duty and compassion on board a ship in time of war. His more profound books sold poorly, and he had been long forgotten by the time of his death. He was rediscovered in the early decades of the 20th century.transcendental works from Melville, Hawthorne, and Poe all comprise the Dark Romanticism subgenre of literature popular during this time.
American lyric
America's two greatest 19th-century poets could hardly have been more different in temperament and style. Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was a working man, a traveler, a self-appointed nurse during the American Civil War (1861-1865), and a poetic innovator. His magnum opus was Leaves of Grass, in which he uses a free-flowing verse and lines of irregular length to depict the all-inclusiveness of American democracy. Taking that motif one step further, the poet equates the vast range of American experience with himself without being egotistical. For example, in Song of Myself, the long, central poem in Leaves of Grass, Whitman writes: «These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me….»was also a poet of the body - «the body electric,» as he called it. In Studies in Classic American Literature, the English novelist D.H. Lawrence wrote that Whitman «was the first to smash the old moral conception that the soul of man is something `superior' and `above' the flesh.»Dickinson (1830-1886), on the other hand, lived the sheltered life of a genteel unmarried woman in small-town Amherst, Massachusetts. Within its formal structure, her poetry is ingenious, witty, exquisitely wrought, and psychologically penetrating. Her work was unconventional for its day, and little of it was published during her lifetime.of her poems dwell on death, often with a mischievous twist. «Because I could not stop for Death,» one begins, «He kindly stopped for me.» The opening of another Dickinson poem toys with her position as a woman in a male-dominated society and an unrecognized poet: «I'm nobody! Who are you? / Are you nobody too?»
Realism, Twain, and James
Mark Twain (the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910) was the first major American writer to be born away from the East Coast - in the border state of Missouri. His regional masterpieces were the memoir Life on the Mississippi and the novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain's style - influenced by journalism, wedded to the vernacular, direct and unadorned but also highly evocative and irreverently funny - changed the way Americans write their language. His characters speak like real people and sound distinctively American, using local dialects, newly invented words, and regional accents. Other writers interested in regional differences and dialect were George W. Cable, Thomas Nelson Page, Joel Chandler Harris, Mary Noailles Murfree (Charles Egbert Craddock), Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Henry Cuyler Bunner, and William Sydney Porter (O. Henry).Dean Howells also represented the realist tradition through his novels, including The Rise of Silas Lapham and his work as editor of the Atlantic Monthly.James (1843-1916) confronted the Old World-New World dilemma by writing directly about it. Although born in New York City, he spent most of his adult years in England. Many of his novels center on Americans who live in or travel to Europe. With its intricate, highly qualified sentences and dissection of emotional and psychological nuance, James's fiction can be daunting. Among his more accessible works are the novellas Daisy Miller, about an enchanting American girl in Europe, and The Turn of the Screw, an enigmatic ghost story.
Turn of the century
Ernest Hemingway in World War I uniform.
At the beginning of the 20th century, American novelists were expanding fiction's social spectrum to encompass both high and low life and sometimes connected to the naturalist school of realism. In her stories and novels, Edith Wharton (1862-1937) scrutinized the upper-class, Eastern-seaboard society in which she had grown up. One of her finest books, The Age of Innocence, centers on a man who chooses to marry a conventional, socially acceptable woman rather than a fascinating outsider. At about the same time, Stephen Crane (1871-1900), best known for his Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage, depicted the life of New York City prostitutes in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. And in Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) portrayed a country girl who moves to Chicago and becomes a kept woman. Hamlin Garland and Frank Norris wrote about the problems of American farmers and other social issues from a naturalist perspective.directly political writings discussed social issues and power of corporations. Some like Edward Bellamy in Looking Backward outlined other possible political and social frameworks. Upton Sinclair, most famous for his meat-packing novel The Jungle, advocated socialism. Other political writers of the period included Edwin Markham, William Vaughn Moody. Journalistic critics, including Ida M. Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens were labelled the The Muckrakers. Henry Adams' literate autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams also depicted a stinging description of the education system and modern life.in style and form soon joined the new freedom in subject matter. In 1909, Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), by then an expatriate in Paris, published Three Lives, an innovative work of fiction influenced by her familiarity with cubism, jazz, and other movements in contemporary art and music. Stein labelled a group of American literary notables who lived in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s as the «Lost Generation».poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972) was born in Idaho but spent much of his adult life in Europe. His work is complex, sometimes obscure, with multiple references to other art forms and to a vast range of literature, both Western and Eastern. He influenced many other poets, notably T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), another expatriate. Eliot wrote spare, cerebral poetry, carried by a dense structure of symbols. In «The Waste Land» he embodied a jaundiced vision of post-World War I society in fragmented, haunted images. Like Pound's, Eliot's poetry could be highly allusive, and some editions of The Waste Land come with footnotes supplied by the poet. In 1948, Eliot won the Nobel Prize in Literature.writers also expressed the disillusionment following upon the war. The stories and novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) capture the restless, pleasure-hungry, defiant mood of the 1920s. Fitzgerald's characteristic theme, expressed poignantly in The Great Gatsby, is the tendency of youth's golden dreams to dissolve in failure and disappointment. Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson also wrote novels with critical depictions of American life. John Dos Passos wrote about the war and also the U.S.A. trilogy which extended into the Depression. Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) saw violence and death first-hand as an ambulance driver in World War I, and the carnage persuaded him that abstract language was mostly empty and misleading. He cut out unnecessary words from his writing, simplified the sentence structure, and concentrated on concrete objects and actions. He adhered to a moral code that emphasized grace under pressure, and his protagonists were strong, silent men who often dealt awkwardly with women. The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms are generally considered his best novels; in 1954, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.years before Hemingway, another American novelist had won the Nobel Prize: William Faulkner (1897-1962). Faulkner managed to encompass an enormous range of humanity in Yoknapatawpha County, a Mississippian region of his own invention. He recorded his characters' seemingly unedited ramblings in order to represent their inner states, a technique called «stream of consciousness.» (In fact, these passages are carefully crafted, and their seemingly chaotic structure conceals multiple layers of meaning.) He also jumbled time sequences to show how the past - especially the slave-holding era of the Deep South - endures in the present. Among his great works are The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, Go Down, Moses, and The Unvanquished.era literature was blunt and direct in its social criticism. John Steinbeck (1902-1968) was born in Salinas, California, where he set many of his stories. His style was simple and evocative, winning him the favor of the readers but not of the critics. Steinbeck often wrote about poor, working-class people and their struggle to lead a decent and honest life; he was probably the most socially aware writer of his period. The Grapes of Wrath, considered his masterpiece, is a strong, socially-oriented novel that tells the story of the Joads, a poor family from Oklahoma and their journey to California in search of a better life. Other popular novels include Tortilla Flat, Of Mice and Men, Cannery Row, and East of Eden. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962. Other writers sometimes considered part of the proletarian school include Nathanael West, Fielding Burke, Jack Conroy, Tom Kromer, Robert Cantwell, Albert Halper, and Edward Anderson.
Post-World War II
There were a number of major American war novels written in the wake of World War II. Some of the most well known included Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1948), novels by Irwin Shaw and James Jones, and later Joseph Heller (Catch-22) and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (Slaughterhouse-Five).the 1950s the West Coast spawned a literary movement, the poetry and fiction of the «Beat Generation,» a name that referred simultaneously to the rhythm of jazz music, to a sense that post-war society was worn out, and to an interest in new forms of experience through drugs, alcohol, and Eastern mysticism. Poet Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) set the tone of social protest and visionary ecstasy in Howl, a Whitmanesque work that begins: «I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness….». Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) celebrated the Beats' rollicking, spontaneous, and vagrant life-style in his masterful and vibrant novel On the Road.writers of the period like J.D. Salinger and Sylvia Plath were starkly individual and cannot be easily classified.
Postmodernism
From the early 1960s through the late 1980s, an important literary movement was postmodernism. Important writers, here, are Thomas Pynchon, author of V. and Gravity's Rainbow, among other things, and Don Delillo, who wrote White Noise. Postmodern writers dealt directly with the way that popular culture and mass media influence the average American's perception and experience of the world. They would set scenes in fast food restaurants, on subways, or in shopping malls; they wrote about drugs, plastic surgery, and television commercials. Sometimes, these depictions look almost like celebrations. But simultaneously, writers in this school take a knowing, self-conscious, sarcastic, and (some critics would say) condescending attitude towards their subjects.
Modern humorist literature
From Irving and Hawthorne to the present day, the short story has been a favorite American form. One of its 20th-century masters was John Cheever (1912-1982), who brought yet another facet of American life into the realm of literature: the affluent suburbs that have grown up around most major cities. Cheever was long associated with The New Yorker, a magazine noted for its wit and sophistication. John Updike also continued Cheever's tradition and is best known for his Rabbit series which began with Rabbit Run.
Southern literature
Faulkner was part of a southern literary renaissance that also included such figures as Truman Capote (1924-1984) and Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964). Although Capote wrote short stories and novels, fiction and nonfiction, his masterpiece was In Cold Blood, a factual account of a multiple murder and its aftermath, which fused dogged reporting with a novelist's penetrating psychology and crystalline prose. Another practitioner of the «nonfiction novel,» Tom Wolfe (1931-) was one of the founders of «New Journalism,» who honed his art in such essays as The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby and Radical Chic before he moved on to book-length efforts, such as his history of the American manned space program The Right Stuff and probably his best-known novel Bonfire of the Vanities. Other writers steeped in the Southern tradition include John Kennedy Toole (1937-1969) and Tom Robbins (1936-).O'Connor was a Catholic, and thus an outsider in the heavily Protestant South in which she grew up. Her characters are Protestant fundamentalists obsessed with both God and Satan. She is best known for her tragicomic short stories.
African American literature
African American literature is literature written by, about, and sometimes specifically for African-Americans. The genre began during the 18th and 19th centuries with writers such as poet Phillis Wheatley and orator Frederick Douglass. Among the themes and issues explored in African American literature are the role of African Americans within the larger American society, African American culture, racism, slavery, and equality.the American Civil War, African American literature primarily focused on the issue of slavery, as indicated by the popular subgenre of slave narratives. At the turn of the 20th century, books by authors such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington debated whether to confront or appease racist attitudes in the United States.American literature saw a surge during the 1920s with the rise of an artistic Black community in the New York City neighborhood of Harlem. The period called the Harlem Renaissance produced such gifted poets as Langston Hughes (1902-1967), Countee Cullen (1903-1946), and Claude McKay (1889-1948). The novelist Zora Neale Hurston (1903-1960) combined a gift for storytelling with the study of anthropology to write vivid stories from the African-American oral tradition. Through such books as the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God - about the life and marriages of a light-skinned African-American woman - Hurston influenced a later generation of black women novelists.World War II, a new receptivity to diverse voices brought black writers into the mainstream of American literature. James Baldwin (1924-1987) expressed his disdain for racism and his celebration of sexuality in Giovanni's Room. In Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison (1914-1994) linked the plight of African Americans, whose race can render them all but invisible to the majority white culture, with the larger theme of the human search for identity in the modern world., African American literature has become accepted as an integral part of American literature, with books in the genre, such as Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley and The Color Purple by Alice Walker, achieving both best-selling and award-winning status. In addition, African American authors such as Nobel Prize winning Toni Morrison are ranked among the top writers in the world.
Jewish American literature
The United States has had a community and tradition of writing by Jewish immigrants and their descendants for a long time, although many writers have objected to being reduced to «Jewish» writers alone. Key modern writers with Jewish origins are Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Grace Paley, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Chaim Potok, Isaac Asimov, Wendy Wasserstein, and Woody Allen, among others. The New Yorker has been especially instrumental in exposing many Jewish-American writers to a wider reading public.
Other genres
Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler pioneered gritty detective fiction that has had great influence on other genres and in other countries.King has been especially successful internationally with his horror fiction.United States has also played a key role in the development of science fiction with authors like Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Robert A. Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, and many others.
J.D. Salinger
Jerome David Salinger (born January 1, 1919) is an American author best known for The Catcher in the Rye, a classic novel that has enjoyed enduring popularity since its publication in 1951. A major theme in Salinger's work is the strong yet delicate mind of «disturbed» adolescents, and the redemptive capacity of children in the lives of such young men. Salinger is also known for his reclusive nature; he has not given an interview since 1980, and has not made a public appearance, nor published any new work (at least under his own name), since 1965.the mid 1990s, there was a flurry of excitement when a small publisher announced a deal with Salinger to bring out the first book version of his final published story, «Hapworth 16, 1924,» but amid the ensuing publicity, Salinger quickly withdrew from the arrangement.
1.2 The Poetry of the United States
The poetry of the United States naturally arose first during its beginnings as the Constitutionally-unified thirteen colonies (although prior to this, a strong oral tradition resembling of poetry existed among Native American societies). Unsurprisingly, most of the early colonists' work relied on contemporary British models of poetic form, diction, and theme. However, in the 19th century, a distinctive American idiom began to emerge. By the later part of that century, when Walt Whitman was winning an enthusiastic audience abroad, poets from the United States had begun to take their place at the forefront of the English-language avant-garde.position was sustained into the 20th century to the extent that Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot were perhaps the most influential English-language poets in the period during World War I. [citation needed] By the 1960s, the young poets of the British Poetry Revival looked to their American contemporaries and predecessors as models for the kind of poetry they wanted to write. Toward the end of the millennium, consideration of American poetry had diversified, as scholars placed an increased emphasis on poetry by women, African Americans, Hispanics, Chicanos and other subcultural groupings. Poetry, and creative writing in general, also tended to become more professionalized with the growth of creative writing programs in the English studies departments of campuses across the country.
Poetry in the colonies
One of the first recorded poets of the British colonies was Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672), who remains one of the earliest known women poets in English. Her poems are untypically tender evocations of home and family life and of her love for her husband. In marked contrast, Edward Taylor (1645-1729) wrote poems expounding Puritan virtues in a highly wrought metaphysical style that can be seen as typical of the early colonial period. This narrow focus on the Puritan ethic was, understandably, the dominant note of most of the poetry written in the colonies during the 17th and early 18th centuries.distinctly American lyric voice of the colonial period was Phillis Wheatley, a slave whose book Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, was published in 1773. She was one of the best-known poets of her day, at least in the colonies, and her poems were typical of New England culture at the time, meditating on religious and classical ideas.18th century saw an increasing emphasis on America as fit subject matter for its poets. This trend is most evident in the works of Philip Freneau (1752-1832), who is also notable for the unusually sympathetic attitude to Native Americans shown in his writings. However, as might be expected from what was essentially provincial writing, this late colonial poetry is generally technically somewhat old-fashioned, deploying the means and methods of Pope and Gray in the era of Blake and Burns.the whole, the development of poetry in the American colonies mirrors the development of the colonies themselves. The early poetry is dominated by the need to preserve the integrity of the Puritan ideals that created the settlement in the first place. As the colonists grew in confidence, the poetry they wrote increasingly reflected their drive towards independence. This shift in subject matter was not reflected in the mode of writing which tended to be conservative, to say the least. This can be seen as a product of the physical remove at which American poets operated from the center of English-language poetic developments in London.
Postcolonial poetry
The first significant poet of the independent United States was William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), whose great contribution was to write rhapsodic poems on the grandeur of prairies and forests. Other notable poets to emerge in the early and middle 19th century include Ralph Waldo Emerson, (1803-1882), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892), Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894), Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), James Russell Lowell (1819-1891), and Sidney Lanier (1842-1881). As might be expected, the works of these writers are united by a common search for a distinctive American voice to distinguish them from their British counterparts. To this end, they explored the landscape and traditions of their native country as materials for their poetry.most significant example of this tendency may be The Song of Hiawatha by Longfellow. This poem uses Native American tales collected by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, who was superintendent of Indian affairs for Michigan from 1836 to 1841. Longfellow also imitated the meter of the Finnish epic poem Kalevala, possibly to avoid British models. The resulting poem, while a popular success, did not provide a model for future U.S. poets.factor that distinguished these poets from their British contemporaries was the influence of the transcendentalism of the poet/philosophers Emerson and Thoreau. Transcendentalism was the distinctly American strain of the English Romanticism that began with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Emerson, as much as anyone the founder of transcendentalism, had visited England as a young man to meet these two English poets, as well as Thomas Carlyle. While Romanticism mellowed into Victorianism in post-reform England, it grew more energetic in America from the 1830s through to the Civil War.Allan Poe was probably the most recognized American poet outside of America during this period. Diverse authors in France, Sweden and Russia were heavily influenced by his works, and his poem «The Raven» swept across Europe, translated into many languages. In the twentieth century the American poet William Carlos Williams said of Poe that he is the only solid ground on which American poetry is anchored.
Whitman and Dickinson
The final emergence of a truly indigenous English-language poetry in the United States was the work of two poets, Walt Whitman (1819-1892) and Emily Dickinson (1830-1886). On the surface, these two poets could not have been less alike. Whitman's long lines, derived from the metric of the King James Version of the Bible, and his democratic inclusiveness stand in stark contrast with Dickinson's concentrated phrases and short lines and stanzas, derived from Protestant hymnals. What links them is their common connection to Emerson (a blurb from whom Whitman printed on the first edition of Leaves of Grass), and a daring quality in regard to the originality of their visions. These two poets can be said to represent the birth of two major American poetic idioms-the free metric and direct emotional expression of Whitman, and the gnomic obscurity and irony of Dickinson-both of which would profoundly stamp the American poetry of the 20th century.development of these idioms can be traced through the works of poets such as Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935), Stephen Crane (1871-1900), Robert Frost (1874-1963) and Carl Sandburg (1878-1967). As a result, by the beginning of the 20th century the outlines of a distinctly new poetic tradition were clear to see.
Modernism and after
This new idiom, combined with a study of 19th-century French poetry, formed the basis of the United States input into 20th-century English-language poetic modernism. Ezra Pound (1885-1972) and T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) were the leading figures at the time, but numerous other poets made important contributions. These included Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) (1886-1961), Adelaide Crapsey (1878-1914), Marianne Moore (1887-1972), E.E. Cummings (1894-1962), and Hart Crane (1899-1932). Williams was to become exemplary for many later poets because he, more than any of his peers, contrived to marry spoken American English with free verse rhythms.these poets were unambiguously aligned with High modernism, other poets active in the United States in the first third of the 20th century were not. Among the most important of the latter were those who were associated with what came to be known as the New Criticism. These included John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974), Allen Tate (1899-1979), and Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989). Other poets of the era, such as Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), experimented with modernist techniques but were also drawn towards more traditional modes of writing. The modernist torch was carried in the 1930s mainly by the group of poets known as the Objectivists. These included Louis Zukofsky (1904-1978), Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976), George Oppen (1908-1984), Carl Rakosi (1903-2004) and, later, Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970). Kenneth Rexroth, who was published in the Objectivist Anthology, was, along with Madeline Gleason (1909-1973), a forerunner of the San Francisco Renaissance. Many of the Objectivists came from urban communities of new immigrants, and this new vein of experience and language enriched the growing American idiom. Another source of enrichment was the emergence into the American poetic mainstream of African American poets such as Langston Hughes (1902-1967) and Countee Cullen (1903-1946).
World War II and after
World War II saw the emergence of a new generation of poets, many of whom were influenced by Wallace Stevens. Richard Eberhart (1904-2005), Karl Shapiro (1913-2000) and Randall Jarrell (1914-1965) all wrote poetry that sprang from experience of active service. Together with Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), Theodore Roethke (1908-1963) and Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966), they formed a generation of poets that in contrast to the preceding generation often wrote in traditional verse forms.the war, a number of new poets and poetic movements emerged. John Berryman (1914-1972) and Robert Lowell (1917-1977) were the leading lights in what was to become known as the confessional movement, which was to have a strong influence on later poets like Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) and Anne Sexton (1928-1974). Both Berryman and Lowell were closely acquainted with modernism, but were mainly interested in exploring their own experiences as subject matter and a style that Lowell referred to as «cooked», that is consciously and carefully crafted.contrast, the Beat poets, who included such figures as Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997), Gregory Corso (1930-2001), Joanne Kyger (born 1934), Gary Snyder (born 1930), Diane Di Prima (born 1934), Denise Levertov (1923-1997), Amiri Baraka (born 1934) and Lawrence Ferlinghetti (born 1919), were distinctly raw. Reflecting, sometimes in an extreme form, the more open, relaxed and searching society of the 1950s and 1960s, the Beats pushed the boundaries of the American idiom in the direction of demotic speech perhaps further than any other group.the same time, the Black Mountain poets, under the leadership of Charles Olson (1910-1970), were working at Black Mountain College. Somewhere between raw and cooked, these poets were exploring the possibilities of open form but in a much more programmatic way than the Beats. The main poets involved were Robert Creeley (1926-2005), Robert Duncan (1919-1988), Ed Dorn (1929-1999), Paul Blackburn (1926-1971), Hilda Morley (1916-1998), John Wieners (1934-2002), and Larry Eigner (1927-1996). They based their approach to poetry on Olson's 1950 essay Projective Verse, in which he called for a form based on the line, a line based on human breath and a mode of writing based on perceptions juxtaposed so that one perception leads directly to another. Cid Corman (1924-2004) and Theodore Enslin (born 1925) are often associated with this group but are perhaps more correctly viewed as direct descendants of the Objectivists.Beats and some of the Black Mountain poets are often considered to have been responsible for the San Francisco Renaissance. However, as previously noted, San Francisco had become a hub of experimental activity from the 1930s thanks to Rexroth and Gleason. Other poets involved in this scene included Charles Bukowski (1920-1994) and Jack Spicer (1925-1965). These poets sought to combine a contemporary spoken idiom with inventive formal experiment. Jerome Rothenberg (born 1931) is well-known for his work in ethnopoetics, but he was also the coiner of the term «deep image». Deep image poetry is inspired by the symbolist theory of correspondences. Other poets who worked with deep image include Robert Kelly (born 1935), Diane Wakoski (born 1937) and Clayton Eshleman (born 1935).Small Press poets (sometimes called the mimeograph movement) are another influential and eclectic group of poets who also surfaced in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1950s and are still active today. Fiercely independent editors, who were also poets, edited and published low-budget periodicals and chapbooks of emerging poets who might otherwise have gone unnoticed. This work ranged from formal to experimental. Gene Fowler, A.D. Winans, Hugh Fox, Paul Foreman, John Bennett, Stephen Morse, Judy L. Brekke, and F.A. Nettelbeck are among the many poets who are still actively continuing the Small Press Poets tradition. Many have turned to the new medium of the Web for its distribution capabilities.as the West Coast had the San Francisco Renaissance and the Small Press Movement, the East Coast produced the New York School. This group aimed to write poetry that spoke directly of everyday experience in everyday language and produced a poetry of urbane wit and elegance that contrasts strongly with the work of their Beat contemporaries. Leading members of the group include John Ashbery (born 1927), Frank O'Hara (1926-1966), Kenneth Koch (1925-2002), James Schuyler (1923-1991), Richard Howard (born 1929), Ted Berrigan (1934-1983), Anne Waldman (born 1945) and Bernadette Mayer (born 1945).Cage (1912-1992), one-time Black Mountain College resident and composer, and Jackson Mac Low (1922-2004) both wrote poetry based on chance or aleatory techniques. Inspired by Zen, Dada and scientific theories of indeterminacy, they were to prove to be important influences on the 1970s U.S avant-garde.Merrill (1926-1995), off to the side of all these groups and very much sui generis, was a poet of great formal virtuosity and the author of the epic poem The Changing Light at Sandover (1982).O'Leary published Fool at the Funeral in 1975 and The Devil Take a Crooked House in 1990. These two critically acclaimed books established O'Leary as a reknowned poet in the New England States.
American poetry now
The last thirty years in United States poetry has seen the emergence of a number of groups and trends. It is probably too soon to judge the long-term importance of these, and what follows is merely a brief outline sketch.1970s saw a revival of interest in surrealism, with the most prominent poets working in this field being Andrei Codrescu (born 1946), Russell Edson (born 1935) and Maxine Chernoff (born 1952). Performance poetry also emerged from the Beat and hippie happenings, and the talk-poems of David Antin (born 1932) and ritual events performed by Rothenberg, to become a serious poetic stance which embraces multiculturalism and a range of poets from a multiplicity of cultures. This mirrored a general growth of interest in poetry by African Americans including Gwendolyn Brooks (born 1917), Maya Angelou (born 1928), Ishmael Reed (born 1938) and Nikki Giovanni (born 1943).most controversial avant-garde grouping during this period has been the Language poets (or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, after the magazine that bears that name). Language-centered writing is extremely theoretical, discounting speech as the basis for verse, and dedicated to questioning the referentiality of language and the dominance of the sentence as the basic unit of syntax. The idea appears to be that language when stripped of its normal associative and denotative meanings becomes closer to the source of language and may actually provide insights that might not otherwise be possible. Those critical of the Language movement point out that taken to its logical conclusion this abandonment of sense and context creates a poetry that could be just as well be written by the proverbial infinite sized room full of monkeys with an infinite number of word processors.Language poets movement includes a very high proportion of women, which mirrors another general trend; the rediscovery and promotion of poetry written both by earlier and contemporary women poets. In addition to Language poets, a number of the most prominent African American poets to emerge are women, and other prominent women writers include Adrienne Rich (born 1929) and Amy Gerstler (born 1956).Language group also contains an unusually high proportion of academics. Poetry has tended to move more and more into the campus, with a growth in creative writing and poetics programs providing an equal growth in the number of teaching posts available to practicing poets. This increased professionalization and abundance of academic presses combined with a lack of any coherent process for critical evaluation is one of the clearest developments and one which seems likely to have unpredictable consequences for the future of poetry in the United States.1980s also saw the emergence of a group of poets who became known as the New Formalists. These poets, who included Molly Peacock, Brad Leithauser, Dana Gioia and Marilyn Hacker, write in traditional forms and have declared that this return to rhyme and more fixed meters is the new avant-garde. Critics of the New Formalists have compared their traditionalism with the conservative politics of the Reagan era. It is intended as an insult.poets (A growing group of poets loosely called Outlaw Poets or Small Press Poets) ignore what they see as the extremes and academic elitism of the self-proclaimed avant-garde of both poetic groups, choosing to use both traditional and experimental approaches to their work., a Chicago construction worker named Marc Smith was growing bored with increasingly esoteric academic poetry readings. In 1984, at the Get Me High Lounge, Smith devised the format that has come to be known as slam poetry. A competitive poetry performance, poetry slam opened the door for a new generation of writers, spoken word performers, and audiences by emphasizing a style of writing that is edgy, topical, and easily understood.slam has produced noted poets like Alix Olson, Taylor Mali, and Saul Williams, as well as inspired hundreds of open mics.
Academy of American Poets
The Academy of American Poets is the preeminent organization in the United States dedicated to the art of poetry. The academy was created in 1934 in New York City by Mrs. Marie Bullock with a mission to «support American poets at all stages of their careers and to foster the appreciation of contemporary poetry.» In 1936, the academy was officially incorporated as a non-profit organization. Ms. Bullock was the president of the academy for the next half a century, running the academy out of her apartment for thirty of those years. She started the academy after her return from her studies at the Sorbonne in Paris. Returning to America, Ms. Bullock was dismayed at the lack of support for poetry in her home country. Taking advice from friends such as Edwin Arlington Robinson and Joseph Auslander, Ms. Bullock raised plans and funds to create the academy and help support and nature the American poet.celebrating over 70 years of existence, the academy fulfills its goals in two ways. The first, to «support American poets», is accomplished by the myriad of awards handed out by the academy. There are seven major awards handed out by the academy and over 200 college awards handed out at schools across the country. To «foster the appreciation of contemporary poetry,» the academy runs numerous programs, including Poets.org, the most popular site about poetry on the web; National Poetry Month (April), the largest literary celebration in the world; an array of Awards & Prizes for poets at every stage of their careers; American Poet, a biannual literary journal; and the Poetry Audio Archive, hundreds of audio recordings of poetry readings dating back to the early 1960s.
Awards given by the academy
Wallace Stevens Award - a lifetime achievement award of $100,000 to recognize outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetryof the Academy of American Poets - a $25,000 award given in memory of James Ingram Merrill, for distinguished poetic achievement at mid-careerMarshall Poetry Prize - $25,000 for the best book of poetry published in the previous yearLaughlin Award - $5,000 to recognize and support a poet's second bookWhitman Award - first-book publication, $5,000, and a one-month artist's residency/de Palchi Translation Awards - $5,000 book prize and $20,000 fellowship (in alternating years) to recognize outstanding translations into English of modern Italian poetryMorton Landon Translation Award - $1,000 for a published translation of poetry from any language into English& University Prizes - $100 individual prizes at more than 200 colleges and universities nationwide
Chicano poetry
Chicano poetry is a branch of American literature written by and primarily about Mexican-Americans and the Mexican-American experience. The term «Chicano» is a politico-cultural term of identity specifically identifying people of Mexican descent who were born in the United States. In the same way that American poetry is comprised of the writing of the offspring of English and other European colonists to North America, so is Chicano poetry and literature comprised of the writing of the off-spring of Latinos who either emigrated to the US or were involuntarily included in the United States due to the Mexican-American War of 1848.
Pioneers and forerunners
Well known Chicano poets who were instrumental in creating a niche both in American and Latin American literature and developed an impetus were early writers such as Abelardo «Lalo» Delgado, Trinidad «Trino» Sanchez, Rodolfo «Corky» Gonzales. Delgado wrote «Stupid America», Sanchez wrote «Why Am I So Brown?» and Gonzales authored the epic «Yo Soy Joaquin.» Another early pioneer writer is the Poet/Painter and gypsy vagabond of the national community, Nephtalí De León, author of «Hey, Mr. President, Man!», «Coca Cola Dream,» and «Chicano Popcorn.»
Unifying concepts
These poems primarily deal with how Chicanos deal with existence in the United States and how Chicanos cope with marginalization, racism and vanquished dreams. Many Chicano writers allude to the past glory of the Mesoamerican civilizations and how the indigenous people of those civilizations continue to live through the Chicano people who are largely «mestizos», people of mixed Native American, European and African ancestry.
1.3 Theater with literature in the United States
of the United States is based in the Western tradition, mostly borrowed from the performance styles prevalent in Europe. Today, it is heavily interlaced with American literature, film, television, and music, and it is not uncommon for a single story to appear in all forms. Regions with significant music scenes often have strong theater and comedy traditions as well. Musical theater may be the most popular form: it is certainly the most colorful, and choreographed motions pioneered on stage have found their way onto movie and television screens. Broadway in New York City is generally considered the pinnacle of commercial U.S. theater, though this art form appears all across the country. Another city of particular note is Chicago, which boasts the most diverse and dynamic theater scene in the country. Regional or resident theatres in the United States are professional theatre companies outside of New York City that produce their own seasons. There is also community theatre and showcase theatre. Even tiny rural communities sometimes awe audiences with extravagant productions.
History
The birth of professional theater in America is usually thought to have begun with the Lewis Hallam troupe which arrived in Williamsburg, Virginia in 1752. However it is certain that theater existed in North America before that. A theater was built in Williamsburg in 1715, and in January 1736, the original Dock Street Theatre was opened in Charles Town, SC. Thomas Kean played the part of Richard III in New York City in 1750, and probably performed in Williamsburg shortly before the Hallams. (Amateur theater is recorded to have existed as early as 1665, when performers of a play were prosecuted in Accomack County, Virginia on charges of public wickedness.) In any case The Hallams were the first to organize a complete company of actors in Europe (London in this case) and bring them to the colonies. They brought a repertoire of the most popular plays from London, including Hamlet, The Recruiting Officer, and Richard III. The Merchant of Venice was their first performance, shown initially on September 15, 1752. Encountering opposition from religious organisations, Hallam and his company left for Jamaica in 1754 or 1755. Soon after, Lewis Hallam's son, Lewis Hallam, Jr., founded the American Company which opened a theater in New York and presented the first professionally-mounted American play, The Prince of Parthia by Thomas Godfrey, in 1767.the 18th century there was widespread opposition to theatrical performances. In the puritanical climate of the time, especially in the North, the theater was considered a «highway to hell». Laws forbidding the performance of plays were passed in Massachusetts in 1750, in Pennsylvania in 1759, and in Rhode Island in 1761, and it was banned in most states during the American Revolutionary War at the urging of the Continental Congress. In 1794 President Timothy Dwight IV of Yale College in his «Essay on the Stage» declared that «to indulge a taste for playgoing means nothing more or less than the loss of that most valuable treasure: the immortal soul.». However it is likely that these ordinances were not strictly enforced, for we have records of performances in many cities during this time.
The 19th century
In the early 19th century, theater became more common in the United States, and many celebrity actors from Europe toured the United States. There were even a few famous American actors, such as Edwin Forrest and Charlotte Cushman. Many theater owners, such as William Dunlap and Thomas Abthorpe Cooper, similarly became well known throughout the young nation.Walnut Street Theatre (or simply The Walnut) is the oldest continuously-operating theater in America, located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at 825 Walnut Street. The Walnut was built by The Circus of Pepin and Breschard, in 1809.cities only had a single theater. Productions were much more rudimentary then, and sometimes plays would be staged in barns or dining rooms when no theater was available. Provincial theaters frequently lacked heat and even minimal props and scenery. As the Westward Expansion of the country progressed, some entrepreneurs staged floating theaters on boats which would travel from town to town. Eventually, towns grew to the size that they could afford «long runs» of a production, and in 1841, a single play was shown in New York City for an unprecedented three weeks.was the most commonly performed playwright, along with other European authors. American playwrights of the period existed, but are mostly forgotten now. American plays of the period are mostly melodramas, often weaving in local themes or characters such as the heroic but ill-fated Indian. The most enduring melodrama of this period is Uncle Tom's Cabin, adapted by H.J. Conway from the novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe.popular form of theater during this time was the minstrel show, arguably the first uniquely American style of performance. These shows featured white actors dressed in blackface and playing up racial stereotypes. These shows became the most watched theatrical form of the era.the 19th century, many preachers continued to warn against attending plays as being sinful. Theater was associated with hedonism and even violence, and actors especially female actors, were looked upon as little better than prostitutes. A serious rivalry between William Charles Macready and Edwin Forrest mirrored the sports rivalries of later years. The Astor Place Riot of 1849 in New York was sparked by this rivalry, and brought about the deaths of 22 people. Then, at the end of the United States Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was shot in Ford's Theater while watching a play.became a popular form of entertainment in the middle of the 19th century. Originally a form of farce in which females in male roles mocked the politics and culture of the day, burlesque was condemned by opinion makers for its sexuality and outspokenness. The form was hounded off the «legitimate stage» and found itself relegated to saloons and barrooms. The female producers were replaced by their male counterparts, who toned down the politics and played up the sexuality, until the shows eventually became little more than pretty girls in skimpy clothing singing songs, while male comedians told raunchy jokes.Civil War ended much of the prosperity of the South, and with it, its independent theaters. Only New Orleans was able to recover its theatrical tradition in the 19th century, if only partially. In the North, theater flourished as a post-war boom allowed longer and more frequest productions. The advent of railroads allowed actors to travel much more easily between towns, making theaters in small towns more feasible. By the late 19th century, there were thousands of cities and towns with at least a rudimentary theater for live productions. This trend also allowed larger and more elaborate sets to travel with players from city to city. The advent of electric lighting led to changes in styles, as more details could be seen by the audience.the 1880s theaters on Broadway in New York City, and along 42nd Street, took on a flavor of their own, giving rise to new stage forms such as the Broadway musical (strongly influenced by the feelings of immigrants coming to New York with great hope and ambition, many of whom went into the theater). New York became the organizing center for theater throughout the U.S.1896, Charles Frohman, Al Hayman, Abe Erlanger, Mark Klaw, Samuel F. Nixon, and Fred Zimmerman formed the Theatrical Syndicate. Their organization established systemized booking networks throughout the United States and created a monopoly that controlled every aspect of contracts and bookings until the late 1910s when the Shubert brothers broke their stranglehold on the industry.show performers Rollin Howard (in female costume) and George Griffin, c. 1855.
The 20th century
2. The role of literature in American life
2.1 The literary role in the national identity
Literature can play an important role in the formation of various forms of social identity, including national, ethnic, and religious identities. This often happens through a fixation, formal or informal, of literary tradition - in other words the establishment of a rule of literary works. In an attempt to illuminate this aspect of identity formation from an interdisciplinary perspective, we viewed above the story of working on literatures of different periods and geographical areas. In this part our aim is to bring influence work from diverse subjects together in order to throw new light not only on the materials studied, but also on the types of questions asked and the perspectives applied.comparison lies especially in its potential for revealing how our objects of study are created and conditioned through our own analyses. Not only is there much to learn about the different ways in which literature is used for purposes of identity formation, but also about the concepts of literature and ideas of identity that we bring to historical materials and the ways in which we go about our analyses.
The contribution of Two Authors
Walt Whitman and Washington Irving contributed to the formation of American literature through the very use of language. This language, then, served as a positive influence in placing America on its own literary map. Irving, for example, was one of the most popular and leading names who believed that we should model a new American identity in fiction. Later, of course, others followed his notion, i.e., the form of satire. Whitman is commonly accepted to be the first indisputable American poet. His use of free verse, different from European traditions, was used to symbolize America in its expansion, in its freedom, and its refusal to be confined to rank, custom, power structures, etc.Irving and Whitman, in their own rights, contributed towards the making of literature which was essentially part of a historical movement overall in America in regard to literature nationalism.literary circles, Irving will always be remembered for having created the character of Rip Van Winkle. His «Rip Van Winkle, A Posthumous Writing of Diedrich Knickerbocker» carved the path for the influence of the short story in becoming an American literary art form. It was the humor in the form of satire with which Irving reached his audience. As such, he became the first American writer to acquire international literary fame. «Rip Van Winkle» is set in New York and encompasses the Dutch colonizing New York. As the reader digests the language, attempts to visualize the milieu of the tale are combined with the effects of early society in New York.'s writing form of satire may have offset other forms of writing during his time towards literary nationalism. «Rip Van Winkle» is also representative of the beginnings of folklore, which is something Irving is credited with in bringing to America. Allegedly, too, at that period of time, America was the leading participant with the short story form. Irving managed to take a simple story blending the nature of romance and fantasy and his writing technique only to arrive with such a well-written piece of literature. We say well-written denoting the popularity and praise of the story. The story is not, however, pronounced with the passion for this or that matter requiring the depth of analysis as can be with Whitman's works. Irving comes across as being very harmonious and somewhat balanced in his form of prose and Whitman is quite serious and emotional.six yeares later after Irving's publication of «Rip Van Winkle,» Whitman delivers his «When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd.» This poem depicts a specific event as well as the aftermath of the Civil War. The speaker in this poem is very much agonizing over Lincoln's death as well as over the country's involvement with the Civil War. While Irving's piece is one of sweet humor and graceful style, Whitman's is of sorrow and concern. Irving is the lesser serious with his ability to create humorous visuals, whereas Whitman uses symbols-the star in «O powerful western fallen star!» representing Abraham Lincoln and «the lilac-bush tall-growing with the heart-shaped leaves of rich green» representing the token for the deceased.would not say with certainty that «Rip Van Winkle» served the political needs of America, but culturally, it illuminated literary circles because of its uniqueness and use of imagination. It was through Irving's experiences, then, that he was enabled to improve his craft and entertain the public, both in America and abroad which gave him international recognition. His transfer of American literature to Europe announced to the reading public that America could make its own efforts towards establishing its own form of literary nationalism independent of European traditions. This has a ring of truth to it aside from the fact it also sounds contradictory in light of the fact that the source he used as a guideline was material from an old German folklore.Knickerbocker, a pen name of Irving's, was a humorous creation of his and his form of satire just explored more imaginative avenues of writing. He took bits and pieces of reality and made them funny. The very idea that Rip Van Winkle slept during the whole entire Revolutionary War is creative in itself. Prior to falling asleep, he was incessantly nagged by his wife and he didn't want to work (some things never change, even throughout history).observing the growth of America, Irving wanted to create a new form of literature with his use of satire taken from experiences as opposed to making use of those experiences by following current trends. This helped to establish a balance with the commonalities of literatre of his time, i.e., entertain the reader with history., too, was observing America as a growing nation. With his «When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd,» the reader might be quick to realize that it is a poem representative to a well-known event, and that the effects of the experience are put into the reader's mindset of emotions. Whitman is writing to the people, and for the people, of his own experience of emotion in such a way that they, too, will experience. Whitman doesn't deploy fantasy like Irving did and rather than entertain his reader, he pulls on the sympathetic nature of the reader. The fact that Whitman lived during the Civil War and Lincoln's assassination was such that he was enabled to represent his historical event in a form of literature. This should convince his readers that it is a piece that serves as a contribution towards nationalism in literature.the prose of Irving, humorous literature was introduced into a fictionalized account of a memorable character within the confines of a short story. Historical circumstances were linked into Irving's tale and Irving's style and form were linked into a piece of national identity in America.the poetry of Whitman, a new form of serious literature came alive with thought provoking language-genuine emotional language. If Whitman's poem was published shortly after Lincoln's assassination, surely he would have readers with comparable emotions who would greatly feel his pain. They would also see, too, that it was not all about the death of one individual, but too many. More than one major historical event was the basis for Whitman's language and they both work together to comprise American literature as well as uphold an American nation.gave America a lovable, yet fictional, hero of the community. Whitman reminds America about one hero who helped to shape it, and other heroes who helped to make it. One is born out of fantasy and imagination and one is born out of reality and emotion. Both contributed to the makings of literary nationalism in America and continue to be influential to the present day.
2.2 Racism reflections in literary works
American African writers about racism
One of the impacts in promoting change in society was literature. Abolitionary literary works were emotionally strained and influenced much on the minds of the Americans. Antislavery literature represents the origins of multicultural literature in the United States. It is the first body of American literature produced by writers of diverse racial origins. was a subject potentially implicated all American writers, it was African Americans whose contributions most signally differentiated American modernism movement. Zora Neal Hurston drew on her childhood memories of the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida, for much of her best-known fiction, including her novel «Their Eyes Were Watching God». W. Faulkner depicted a South at once specific to his native state of Mississippi and expanded into a mythic region anguished by racial and historical conflict.numerous writers associated with the Harlem renaissance made it impossible ever to think of a national literature without the work of black Americans, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neal Hurston attained particular prominence at the time: but others including Claude McKay and Nella Larsen were also well known.wrote a number of powerful anti-lynching and anti-capitalist poems; but in general the movement was deliberately upbeat, taking the line that racial justice was about to become reality in the United states, or like Hurston, focusing more on the vitality of black culture than on the burdens of racism. At least part of this approach was strategic-the bulk of the readership for Harlem authors was white. Some women writers found social causes like labor and racism more important than womens rights; others focused their energies on struggles less amenable to public, legal remedies.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is a memoir and treatise on abolition written by famous orator and ex-slave, Frederick Douglass (1818-1895). It is generally held to be the most famous of a number of narratives written by former slaves during the same period. In factual detail, the text describes the events of his life and is considered to be one of the most influential pieces of literature to fuel the abolitionist movement of the early 19th century in the United States. He was a firm believer in the equality of all people, whether black, female, Native American, or recent immigrant. He was fond of saying, «I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.»
Harriet A. Jacobs (Linda Brent) (1813-1897) ran away from slavery to make a new life for herself in the North; the story of her life under slavery, her protracted flight towards freedom, and the conditions she found once she got there, make up the structure of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Today, it is regarded as the most in-depth and textured pre-Civil War slave narrative written by a black woman in America.
Booker Washington (1856-1915) between the last decade of the nineteenth century and the beginning of World War I, no one exercised more influence over race relations in the United States than did Booker T. Washington; some contemporary historians of the African American experience in America call the period the «Era of Booker T. Washington». His influence continues to th present day. He wanted to help African Americans enter mainstream white society with the least possible violence and thus advocated an educational program of vocational rather than intellectual or professional training. His works have been contrasted with the dynamic and militant efforts of Frederick Douglass and the intellectual and professional initiatives of the fiercely independent W.E.B. Du Bois, but Washington was able to institutionalize his power to a far greater degree than either of these two. He owed no small part of his power to extraordinary skill with written and spoken language. To his sense of calling Washington added the command of memory and the detail of living as a racial «other, all of which he expressed in an unforgettable voice.his brilliant autobiography, «Up from Slavery» (1901), a masterpiece of the genre that was widely praised in the United States and popular in translation around the world. The early chapters reveal the physical and psychological realities of Washingtons origins, realities that were shared by so many millions of the slaves set «free» at the conclusion of the Civil War. Later chapters show Washington at the peak of his success as an African American spokesperson, particularly as a master of rhetoric that allowed him to appear both as sincerely humble and as force to be reckoned with, both as a man of selfless industry and as one of considerable political know-how.his works he urges African Americans to emulate the proverbial ship captain who urged his crew to «cast down your buckets where you are» even though they were still at sea, and who thus found fresh water at the mouth of a river. He argued that by seeking improvement African Americans would inevitably rise as individuals. Yet he also urged whites not to judge African American children against white children until they had had a chance to catch up in school. In short, Washington proposed a middle ground wherein African Americans would rise themselves by individual effort and white Americans would appreciate the efforts being made and judge accordingly. Up from slavery is as important as a literary production as it is a record of time, place, and person. Washingtons skillful use of metaphor and symbol, his deftly masked ironies, and the art of his artlessness have been addressed by such critics as William Andrews, Houston A. Baker, and James M. Cox.
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963) in his major work The Philadelphia Negro, that expressed the steady stream of important studies of African American life. Dedicated to the rigorous, scholarly examination of the so-called Negro Problem, Du Bois had to face up to the violent realities of the lives he proposed to study. He first came to national attention with the publication of «The Souls of Black Folk» (1903), characterized by scholar Eric J. Sundquist as «the preeminent text of African American cultural consciousness».chapters explore the implications of this extraordinary books dramatic and prophetic announcement in its «Forethought» that «the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line». In the first chapter, «Of Our Spiritual Strivings», Du Bois introduces another concept that would inform his thinking for the rest of his career-the notion of the «twoness» of African Americans: «One ever feels his twoness», Du Bois asserts, «an American, a Negro: two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder». This foundational observation hit on what Du Bois named «double-consciousness». In his essay «The Negro Problem» (1903), he meant college-educated African Americans who could provide leadership for African Americans after Reconstruction. Du Bois offers a concise overview of the Negro in America cast in the highly charged rhetoric of the orator who wishes to move as well as inform his audience. Du Bois became a leader in the Niagara Movement (1905), a movement aggressively demanding for African Americans the same civil rights enjoyed by white Americans.1910 Du Bois served as an editor of Crisis, the official publication of the newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an organization he helped to create. Through this publication Du Bois reached an increasingly large audience-one hundred thousand by 1919-with powerful messages that argued the need for black development and white social enlightenment. From 1920 Du Bois shifted his attention from the reform of race relations in America through research and political legislation to the search for longer-range worldwide economic solutions to the international problems of inequity among the races. He began a steady movement toward Pan-African and socialist perspectives that led to his joining the US Communist Party in 1961 and, in the year of his death, becoming a citizen of Ghana. He was extremely active as a politician, organizer, and diplomat, and he continued as a powerful writer of poetry, fiction, autobiography, essays, and scholarly works. Martin Luther King spoke of Du Bois as «one of the most remarkable men of our time».distinguished and most popular writer Langston Hughes (1902-1967) captured the dominant and improvisatory traditions of black culture in written form. Eleven of his poems were published in Alain Lockes pioneering anthology, The New Negro (1925), and he also well represented in Countee Gullens 1927 anthology, Caroling Dusk. Carl Van Vechten, one of the white patrons of African American writing, helped get The Weary Blues, Hughes first volume of poems, published in 1926.this year, his important essay «The Negro Artist and Racial Mountain» appeared in the Nation, he described the immense challenges to be faced by the serious black artist «who would produce a racial art» but insisted on the need for courageous artists to make the attempt. The publication of his novel Not without Laughter in 1930 glorified his reputation and sales, enabling him to support himself. By the 1930s he was being called «the bard of Harlem».and other blacks were drawn by the American Communist Party, which made racial justice an important plank in its platform, promoting an image of working-class solidarity that nullified racial boundaries. He visited the Soviet Union in 1932 and produced a significant amount of radical boundaries. He visited the Soviet Union in 1932 and produced a significant amount of radical writing up to the eve of World War II. He covered the Spanish civil war for the Baltimore Afro-American in 1937.the 1950s and 1960s Hughes published a variety of anthologies for children and adults, including The First Book of Negroes (1952), The First Book of Jazz (1955), and The Book of Negro Folklore (1958). In 1953 he was called to testify before the Senator Joseph McCarthys committee on subversive activities in connection with his 1930 radicalism. The FBI listed him as a security risk until 1959; and during these years, when he could not travel outside the United States because he would not have been allowed to re-enter the country. Hughes worked to rehabilitate his reputation as a good American by producing patriotic poetry. From 1960 to the end of his life he was again on the international circuit.the spectrum of artistic possibilities open to writers of the Harlem Renaissance-drawing on African American folk forms; on literary traditions and forms that entered the United States from Europe and Great Britain; or on the new cultural forms of blacks in American cities-Hughes chose to focus his work on modern, urban black life. He modeled his stanza forms on the improvisatory rhythms of jazz music and adapted the vocabulary of everyday black speech to poetry. He also acknowledged finding inspiration for his writing in the work of whit American poets who preceded him. Like Walt Whitman he heard America singing, he asserted his right to sing America back; he also learned from Carl Sandburgs earlier attempts to work jazz into poetry. Hughes did not confuse his pride in African American culture with complacency toward the material deprivations of black life in the United States. He was keenly aware that the modernist «vogue in things Negro» among white Americans was potentially exploitative and voyeuristic; he confronted such racial tourists with the misery as well as the jazz of Chicagos South Side. Early and late, Hughes poems demanded that African Americans be acknowledged as owners of the culture they gave to the United States and as fully enfranchised American citizens.
I, Too
I, too, sing America. I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes, But I laugh, And eat well, and grow strong.,ll be at the tablecompany comes.ll dareto me,
«Eat in the kitchen»,.,ll see how beautiful I ambe ashamed-, too, am America. (Hughes, 2028)
Words Like Freedom
There are words like Freedomand wonderful to say.my heart-strings freedom singsday everyday.are words like Libertyalmost make me cry,you had known what I knowwould know why. (Hughes, 2033)
Ellison (1914-1994) «If the Negro, or any other writer, is going to do whats expected of him, hes lost the battle before he takes the field». His importance to American letters is partly due to this independence. He also did the unexpected, however, in not following his fine first novel with the others that were predicted. «Invisible Man» published in 1945, and won the National Book Award. The novel outlived Ellisons expectations, but not without suffering attacks from critics. The most powerful of these, Irving Howe, took the authors to task for not following R. Wrights lead and devoting his fiction to the Negro cause. Howe believed that African Americans should write social protest novels about the tragedy of black ghetto life. Invisible Man had used its protagonists «invisibility» to entertain a much broader range of possibilities; and though by no means socially irresponsible, the novel is dedicated to the richness of life and art that becomes possible when the imagination is liberated from close realism.have come to understand the genre of African American literature as encompassing any piece of literature that deals specifically with issues unique to African Americans as a culture.the last half of the 19th century, African-American plays began to be written. Prior to this time, African-Americans did not participate nor did they have a voice in the American theater. Because white playwrights wrote and enacted African-Americans with blackface, the true essence of the African-American struggle was not viewed by the American audience. Though African-Americans found success in Europe, they wanted to have a voice in America that portrayed what they went through and appealed to them. Several playwrights started the movement in which African-Americans wrote and acted in plays about African-Americans and their struggles with racism in America.are quite a few notable African-American playwrights that have created plays reflecting the African American experience, including some whose plays have been performed on Broadway. Lorraine Hansberry, playwright and author, wrote A Raisin in the Sun, the first play written by an African-American woman to debut in Broadway theaters. She also was the first African-American woman to receive the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Langston Hughes, a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, wrote a number of plays. Two of his plays, Mullato, a play about miscegenation, and Simply Heaven, were seen from Broadway stage. NtozakeShange, African-American playwright and poet, wrote For Coloured Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow is Enuf, appeared on Broadway and won the OBIE award. The play is about the struggles of seven African-American women that not only have to deal with being an African-American but have to deal with life issues such as rape and abortion.African-American struggle is one that could only be told by African-Americans. Important figures created works that reflected issues that were prevalent within the race and created a place for more African-American playwrights to follow. African American writers in the early twentieth century were using Realism in their art to tell their story.writers can write about anything, they are certainly not limited to issues of race or slavery. An author's skin color should not have anything to do with what label goes on that author's writing.novel «The Bluest Eye» by Toni Morrison, a book that deals with the issue of skin color as it correlates to beauty and equality. Throughout her career Morrison has been dedicated to constructing a practical cultural identity of a race and a gender whose self-images have been obscured or denied by dominating forces. This genre does not have to refer to pieces that deal only with slavery, inequality, or segregation. In «Bluest Eye» the girls need to be loved generates the novels action, action that involves displaced and alienated affections (and eventually incestuous rape); the familys inability to produce a style of existence in which love can be born and thrive leads to such a devastating fate for Morrisons protagonist.short story «Recitatif» directly addresses the issues of individual and family, past and present, and race and its effacements that motivate the larger sense of her work. A «recitatif» is a vocal performance in which narrative is not stated but sung. In her works Morrisons voice sings proudly of a past that in the artistic nature of its reconstruction puts all Americans in touch with a more positively usable heritage.remarkable «ever vocal woman» of African American literature Toni Cade Bambara (1939-1995) wrote about activists in their societies, societies that in their flux demand creative readjustment at every stage. In «Tales and Stories of Black Folks» (1971) an anthology that provides ample evidence for how African Americans not only created folk legends but adapted European and African materials to their own uniquely American ends. In this writers fiction readers can see the same process taking place, a joyful embrace of voice as the most personal statement possible in a world dependent on self-invention for survival.
Margaret Walkers Jubilee is a semi-fictional account of «Vyry Brown,» based on the life of author M. Walker's grandmother, Margaret Duggans Ware Brown.Brown is a mixed-race slave-the unacknowledged daughter of her master-who is born onto the Dutton plantation in Georgia. The novel follows her experiences from early childhood to adult life. The story of Vyry's life in the novel spans three major periods of American history: Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.
Jubilee draws on both history and folk traditions. The final section of Jubilee thus shifts its focus to the education of blacks during and after Reconstruction.ending of Jubilee suggests a connection between the events the novel has described during Reconstruction and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The narrative ends on a train bound for Selma. As Jim and his father board the train, the conductor announces the segregated seating order-colored up front and whites in the rear.authors revealed the psychological and social impact of slavery, struggle of under-appreciated individuals to find their roots. The main characters face the life hardships, reaction to the unjust treatment by the white people and seeking for self-identity, the question for selfhood for them is a motivating factor.of African American literature do not have to be black. The material needs only to have connections to black culture or history. The profession of writing entails the ability to create from many different perspectives.book called «The Help» by Kathryn Stockett, a white author, writes from the perspectives of several different characters including two African American women working as maids in Mississippi during the 1960s. «The Help» is clearly a book that addresses issues of race and segregation., the classic work «Uncle Tom's Cabin» was written by another white woman, Harriet Beecher Stowe. This book would also qualify as African American literature because of its subject matter. Stowe wrote the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851-52) in reaction to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made it illegal to assist an escaped slave. The book was quickly translated into 37 languages and sold in five years over half a million copies in the United States. Uncle Tom's Cabin was also among the most popular plays of the 19th century.novel was so popular that it was made into a traveling melodrama and played to audiences throughout the North. Southern journals denounced the novel declaring that its portrayal of slavery was pure fabrication, an invention of the authors imagination.most white writers of her day, H.B. Stowe could not escape the racism of the time. Because of this, her work has some serious flaws, which in turn have helped perpetuate damaging images of African Americans. However, the book, within its genre of romance, was enormously complex in character and in its plots. The book outraged the South, and in the long run, that is its significance.
Another issue on the subject is that the whites were most successful in spreading their racism among their own offspring. «The whites practiced widespread sexual trafficking in African slaves which produced Mulatto babies who, due to the resentment instilled by their fathers, grew up to resent the race of their mothers» [Williams 50]. This quote is significant because it reveals one of the main methods through which whites were able to spread their prejudice among people who shared an African lineage and once more showing the purity of the white race. (Williams, Chancellor. The Destruction of Black Civilization. Chicago: Third World Press, 1987)
Kate Chopin (1851-1904) emerged as one of the greatest as well as most admired American short story writers, novelists, poets, and essayists. In many of Chopins stories she has transcended simple regionalism and portrayed women who seek spiritual and sexual freedom amidst the restrictive mores of nineteenth-century Southern society. She brought attention to the racial issues that existed during the times of slavery through her short story «Désirées Baby» which introduces the two main characters in the story, Désirée and Armand, and creates many symbolisms, ironies, and themes seen throughout the story.
It is a tragic tale of race and gender in antebellum Louisiana. Desiree is deeply in love with her husband Armand, and he is a loving husband and proud father until he notices their infants dark skin. Because Desiree was abandoned as a child, her ancestry is unknown. Armand concludes that she is not white and tells her to leave. His rejection drives Desiree to take her own life and that of the baby. A few weeks later, Armand discovers that he is of mixed ancestry.following extracts will clearly describe the content of the story concerning the race problems of that time.
. «Oh, Armand is the proudest father in the parish, I believe, chiefly because it is a boy, to bear his name… he hasnt punished one of them - not one of them - since baby is born… Oh, mamma, Im so happy; it frightens me.»
2. «When the baby was about three months old … a strange, an awful change in her husbands manner, which she dared not ask him to explain…. The old love-light seemed to have gone out…. Spirit of Satan seemed suddenly to take hold of him in his dealings with the slaves.»
3. Desirees eyes had been fixed absently and sadly upon the baby… Ah! It was a cry that she couldnt help… The blood turned like ice in her veins…»
«Tell me what it means!»
«It means,» he answered lightly, «that the child is not white, it means that you are not white.»
4. My mother, they tell me Im not white. Armand has told me I am not white. For Gods sake tell them it is not true… I shall die. I must die…»
The answer that came was brief: «My own Desiree: Come home to Valmonde: back to your mother who loves you.come with your child.»
5. Desiree has to bear the heaviest burden, being driven away from love and safety, left bereft. She has nothing but despair, and so drowns herself and her baby in the bayou.
Once Desiree and baby died, Armand found a letter of his mother written to his father. In the last words of the story, the tragic irony of it all occurs:
«…night and day, I thank the good God for having so arranged our lives that our dear Armand will never know that his mother, who adores him, belongs to the race that is cursed with the brand of slavery.»
The story doesnt only confront the racial issues that took place during the time of slavery but also draws upon the readers emotions to experience how people thought during that time period.word «stereotype» comes with negative connotations because it is generally used to describe an off-putting generalization. It becomes necessary though when talking about facets of something like a certain group of people or culture. The other problem with stereotypes is the way they vary from person to person. One person might assume one thing about a certain group of people while another might assume the opposite, making universal stereotyping difficult. It is up to both the author and the reader to determine whether or not a work falls under the category of African American literature.recent decades, scholars and readers have criticized the book «Uncle Toms Cabin» for what are seen as condescending racist descriptions of the book's black characters, especially with regard to the characters' appearances, speech, and behavior, as well as the passive nature of Uncle Tom in accepting his fate. The novel's creation and use of common stereotypes about African Americans is important because Uncle Tom's Cabin was the best-selling novel in the world during the 19th century. As a result, the book (along with images illustrating the book and associated stage productions) had a major role in permanently ingraining these stereotypes into the American psyche.the stereotypes of blacks in Uncle Tom's Cabin are: The «happy darky» (in the lazy, carefree character of Sam);light-skinned tragic mulatto as a sex object (in the characters of Eliza, Cassy, and Emmeline);affectionate, dark-skinned female mammy (through several characters, including Mammy, a cook at the St. Clare plantation).Pickaninny stereotype of black children (in the character of Topsy);
The Uncle Tom, or African American who is too eager to please white people (in the character of Uncle Tom).intended Tom to be a «noble hero.» The stereotype of him as a «subservient fool who bows down to the white man» evidently resulted from staged «Tom Shows,» over which Stowe had no control., scholars such as Henry Louis Gates Jr. have begun to reexamine Uncle Tom's Cabin, stating that the book is a «central document in American race relations and a significant moral and political exploration of the character of those relations.»are many modern subjects that can be explored through literature besides these. For example, a piece of African American literature might touch on the use of the «N» word in today's popular culture.can be anything that either the reader or the writer deems a legitimate African American issue to be as long as there is evidence that one can make a claim for and defend successfully. Critics have argued that this genre no longer exists because American culture no longer has to deal with difficulties such as slavery or the Jim Crow laws. It is true that these things no longer exist, but racism and problems concerning race are still rampant in our society even if they now manifest themselves in slightly different ways.American literature includes any piece of literature that deals in particular with issues that are related to African Americans as a people. This does not mean the author needs to be black though, writers of any skin tone can fashion characters with many different perspectives and cultures. The common misconception that this genre includes many works or biography and autobiography is false. Many pieces of African American literature are fictional. Topics that are included in this genre can include slavery and the like, but they can also be more modern. African American literature is a growing category just like any other type of literature.
2.3 Comparative analysis of the novel «To Kill a Mockingbird» Harper Lee and story «Going to Meet The Man» by James Baldwin
In order to explain influence of racism on literature, we took in the capacity of analysis the American novel «To Kill a Mockingbird» Harper Lee and the story «Going to Meet The Man» by James Baldwin.Lees place in American letters was secured in 1960 with the publication of her Pulitzer Prize winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), the story of a young girls encounter with fear, ignorance, and courage in a small Southern town.graduating from the University of Alabama in 1948 and spending a year studying law at Oxford University, Lee headed north to New York City. She took a job as n airline reservation clerk and in her spare time wrote fictitious accounts of he childhood experiences. In 1957 she submitted the manuscript to a New York publisher; one of the editors felt it had potential but was too episodic and suggested she quit her job and work full time on her book. After «a long and hopeless period of writing the book over and over again» the book was finally published.some critics found the novel too melodramatic and objected to having an eight-year old narrator with a mature womans ability to recall the past, Lees first and only novel became an immediate best-seller.recipient of the 1961 Pulitzer Prize in fiction and the Brotherhood Award from the National Conference of Christians and Jews, To Kill a Mockingbird was adapted into film, which in 1962 won two Academy Awards. Subsequently, critics reevaluated the novels author, this time acclaiming her as a «remarkable story-teller» who possessed «wit and compassion». By 1975 the novel had sold more than 11 million copies and had been translated into 10 languages.story covers a three-year period during which Scout, and eight-year old girl, and her brother, Jem, observe a trial at which their father, Atticus Finch, a town lawyer, defends Tom Robinson, a black man unjustly accused of raping a white woman Mayella Ewell. They come to admire their father for standing up to injustice and racism and to understand that to kill Tom would be a senseless as to destroy a mockingbird who, «dont do one thing but make music for us to enjoy». Atticus is intent on ensuring Tom Robinson receives a fair trial and is brought to justice. When a Negro is falsely accused of rape, the townspeople judge him guilty based on his color, creating obvious problems for the defendant and his family, and the fair-minded adults and children who are disgusted by prejudice and hypocrisy: «There's something in our world that makes men lose their heads-they couldn't be fair if they tried. In our courts, when it's a white man's word against a black man's, the white man always wins. They're ugly, but those are the facts of life.» (Lee, 1960, p. 243) Atticus addresses the jury with a passionate speech on equality as he entreats them to come up with a «not guilty» verdict: there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal-there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein and the ignorant man the equal of a college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court. and in our courts all men are created equal. (Lee, 1960, pp.266-267)
Tom Robinson's lack of suspicion gets him into trouble in the first place; he willingly walks into Mayella's home thinking she needs his help. When she accosts him, he runs and is caught by Bob Ewell who claims he tried to rape his daughter, which begins the story of Tom Robinson's trial. Atticus's success in planting the seeds of doubt in the townspeople's mind about Bob Ewell's honesty causes the varmint to seek revenge, accelerating the story to its climactic moment when Bob Ewell attempts to murder the Finch children, «'. he knows in his heart that very few people in Maycomb really believe his and Mayella's yarns'» (Lee, 1960, p. 275); and so forth.the interest of justice, witnesses are called to testify to provide an insight into what happened between Tom and Mayella. Bob Ewell's version of the events that occurred is clearly a lie, and as a consequence he is not able to put the bad reputation he has had in the past with the townspeople behind him,
«. He knows in his heart that very few people in Maycomb really believe his and Mayella's yarns. He thought he'd be a hero but all he got for his pains was. was, okay, we'll convict this Negro but get back to your dump.» (Lee, 1960, pp.275-276);racial injustice fictionalized in classic «To Kill a Mockingbird» was really as usual business during the time depicted in the novel. Such injustice and even worse things, such as hangings and murder, were part of the culture of that time.was quite clear to the white jury that the alleged perpetrator was innocent. They convicted him because he was black, yes, but they also convicted him because they had to protect their own fragile worldview. In that worldview, white women are not attracted to black men. To accept that the woman was the aggressor was impossible, given that worldview. In the minds of the jury and most of the whites in town, the black man had to have attempted to assault the white woman because anything else was impossible.seems hard to believe, but they may have actually convinced themselves that the black man was guilty and the white woman was his victim. To believe otherwise would be to begin the unraveling of their culture, their society, their most cherished beliefs about themselves and the world. Rather than wait for his case to be put before the court of appeals, Tom Robinson, believing the past will not change attempts to escape prison and is shot down, «'I guess Tom was tired of white men's chances and preferred to take his own'» (Lee, 1960, p. 260);
The Negroes in the community already suffer from their past history of slavery, and as Tom's honest recollections of the events of November 21 do not result in justice, an opportunity for the Negro community to rise above their past is lost.
The court demands its witnesses to give their honest recollection of what happened on November 21 at the Ewell's shack in order that justice may be served. This goal is not achieved; Bob and Mayella Ewell lie about what they remember, and as they have lied to the sheriff, Heck Tate, his memory is biased; Tom Robinson tells what really happened but is still found guilty of a crime he did not commit.main character, Atticus Finch is exceptionally good at compromising. An example of this is where he comforts Scout by saying if she goes to school and gets an education then they will carry on reading together against her teachers word.is completely anti racist. Although he dislikes the dirt of Maycomb County like the Ewell family, he accepts Negroes as an every day normal human being. During the period which the book is written around, black peoples were thought of as trash, but Atticus humiliated many white people by hiring Calpurnia to work in the house and look after Jem and Scout. Atticus has much respect from black communities by doing this, and after Tom Robinsons court case; even thought he is found guilty; the Negros who attended the trial stood up as he left the shocked court room respecting him.Finch has a great ability to cope with pressure. He does not care about other peoples views including his nephew Francis who calls him a «nigger Lover.» Mr Harry Johnsons dog, Tim Johnson, had caught onto rabies. Atticus is a very astute father, after Calpurnia had rung him to tell him, he tells her to keep inside the children and ring local neighbours warning them not to venture out into the street. (p98-100) He does not enjoy grabbing the lime light and first off tells the sheriff Heck Tate, that he better shoot mad Tim Johnson. However, many would falter under pressure, and Heck was one that would. Heck has confidence in Atticus so much that he wants him to take the one shot and put the dog out of its misery. He succeeded in the task, the street came alive and Jem and Scout stood beleaguered that their father had that much personal fortitude. His children did not know that Atticus was the deadest shot in Maycomb County until Miss Maudie informed them of this feat. Atticus had now gained much more respect, and even more respect off his own children.accused Tom Robinson was a Negro so many white people would be after his scalp. Atticus had Tom moved into Maycomb Jail house. One evening he took an extension lead with a light bulb on the end of it into town with him one evening. Atticus was a cool and calculated character and in this instance it is pointed out. A bunch of anti-Negros had gathered outside the Jail house, where Tom Robinson was being held. The gang/bunch had a joint IQ of most likely below 90, so putting them in their place was not a hard job for Atticus Finch, the local attorney. Whilst the men became agitated at Atticuss refusal to let them have Tom, Mr Finch refused to resort to violence in this matter. Atticus, having refused to believe Heck Tate that a group would try to stir up some bother over Toms occupancy of the jail house, took the precaution to look after his client and as ever, take care of his own and his familys business.Lee's psychological understanding is brilliant in this work and this book is about much more than simple racial injustice. It is about the heart of humans and our capability to build stories and myths that allow us to commit terrible crimes in the name of justice, democracy, and freedom.second story «Going to meet the Man», that we are going to analyze is written by James Baldwin (1924-1987) Harlem born black writer, like the novelist Ralph Ellison, went about protesting in his own way. As far as his novels are concerned, Baldwins way involved a preoccupation with the intertwining of sexual with racial concerns, particularly in America.
Nobody Knows My Name (1962), a collections of essays, explored among others black-white relations in the U.S., William Faulkner's views on segregation, and Richard Wright's work. Wright had encouraged Baldwin when he was an aspiring writer but they never became close friends. The book became a bestseller as The Fire Next Time (1963), in which the author appraised the Black Muslim (Nation of Islam) movement, and warned that violence would result if white America does not change its attitudes toward black Americans. Baldwin's reports on the civil rights activities of the 1960s made him special target of the U.S. FBI, that alone accumulated a 1750-page file on him. In the title essay of Notes Of a Native Son (1955) Baldwin took examples from his own family and the Harlem riot of 1943 to describe the experience of growing up black in America.interest in what it means to be black and homosexual interrelation to mainstream white society is most fully and interestingly expressed in his third novel, Another Country (1962). The novel contains scenes full of lively detail and intelligent reflection, expressed in a manner that takes advantage of the novels expansive form. After the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968 and drawbacks in civil-rights movement, Baldwin started bitterly to acknowledge that violence may be the only route to racial justice. Some optimism about peaceful progress would later return, but in the early 1970s he also suffered from writer's block. «Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent-which attitude certainly has a great deal to support it.» (Baldwin in Collected Essays, 1998)
Evidence of The Things Seen (1983) was an account of unsolved murder of 28 black children in Atlanta in 1980 and 1981. In his short stories collected in «Going to meet the Man» (1965) the racial terrorism of America as he perceived it made its own grotesque stylistic statement. The writers challenge was to maintain steady control in the face of atrocities that might otherwise disrupt the narratives ability to contain such events.main character, acting town sheriff, Jesse, has a racist beliefs, he thinks that he is a just, good man in what he does for the citizens. He informs his wife of Big Jim Cs attempt at making quiet a batch of black men who were singing; the account is intermingled with vehement racism, though the man is sure that he is doing the right thing. J. Baldwin describes the black people from the white mans perspective: «…those faces, good Christ! they were ugly! They were animals, they were no better than animals, what could be done with these people like that?. their houses were dark, with oil cloth or card-board in the windows, the smell was enough to make you puke your guts out and there they sat, laughing and talking and playing music like they didnt have a care in the world» (Baldwin, NA, 2510)then recollects when he was a child and his father took him to see a black man being tortured with fire to death. Jesse's father is also the sheriff of the town. The black man that is tortured was apparently running away and was caught and found. His genitals were cut off while the white townspeople stood around watching this black man hanging from a tree, his hands chained above his head, tied to the tree. The black man was naked and a fire was set beneath him.
«His hands were straight above his head; and he was a big man, a bigger man than his father, and as black as an African jungle cat, and naked…. The flames leapt up. He was lowered again; he was raised again. The head went back, the mouth wide open, blood bubbling from the mouth, the veins of the neck jumped out; The cry of all the people rose to answer the dying mans cry. He wanted death to come quickly. They wanted to make death wait…What did he do? What did the man do? What did he do? - wondered the boy, but he could not ask his father. (Baldwin, NA, 2519) Both of his parents were watching this horrible and violent scene.Main themes of the story is racism and police brutality. The racial terrorism of America as he perceived it made its own grotesque stylistic statement. The Writers challenge was to maintain steady control in the face of atrocities that might otherwise disrupt the narratives ability to contain such events.the history we learned that between 1885 and 1910, about thirty-five hundred African Americans were lynched and when following the end of reconstruction, most southern states effectively disenfranchised African Americans.Ralph Ellison, he experienced many pressures to be more than just a writer, but he nevertheless produced artistically significant novels and stories. No black writer has been better able to imagine white experience, to speak in various tones of different kinds and behaviors of people or places other than his own. In its sensitivity to shades of discrimination and moral shape, and in its commitment-despite everything-to America, his voice was comparable in importance to that of any person of letters from recent decades, as tributes paid to him at his death agreed.these two works we came to an idea that, racial prejudice is still with us and is a universal phenomenon. But more than simple racial prejudice, leading to injustice, are demonstrated in these works. It is easy to say that the injustice occurs because of racial and class prejudice.is important to look past the obvious racial injustice. Racial injustice continues today in this country and around the world, as does religious injustice. But what is behind this injustice today, as it was in these stories, is a powerful cultural myth that must be maintained at any cost. The mind has to be perfectly capable of holding diametrically opposed viewpoints in order to protect that myth.the most prominent and notable form of American racism (other than imperialism against Native Americans) began with the institution of slavery, during which Africans were enslaved and treated as property. Prior to the institution of slavery, early African and non-white immigrants to the Colonies had been regarded with equal status, serving as sharecroppers alongside whites. After the institution of slavery the status of Africans was stigmatized, and this stigma was the basis for the more virulent anti-African racism that persisted until the present.colonial America, before slavery became completely based on racial lines, thousands of African slaves served European colonists, alongside other Europeans serving a term of indentured servitude. In some cases for African slaves, a term of service meant freedom and a land grant afterward, but these were rarely awarded, and few former slaves became landowners this way. In a precursor to the American Revolution, Nathaniel Bacon led a revolt in 1676 against the Governor of Virginia and the system of exploitation he represented: exploitation of poorer colonists by the increasingly wealthy landowners where poorer people, regardless of skin color, fought side by side. However, Bacon died, probably of dysentery; hundreds of participants in the revolt were lured to disarm by a promised amnesty; and the revolt lost steam.were primarily used for agricultural labor, notably in the production of cotton and tobacco. Black slavery in the Northeast was common until the early 19th century, when many Northeastern states abolished slavery. Slaves were used as a labor force in agricultural production, shipyards, docks, and as domestic servants. In both regions, only the wealthiest Americans owned slaves. In contrast, poor whites recognized that slavery devalued their own labor. The social rift along color lines soon became ingrained in every aspect of colonial American culture. Approximately one Southern family in four held slaves prior to war. According to the 1860 U.S. census, there were about 385,000 slave owners out of approximately 1.5 million white families.the early part of the 19th century, a variety of organizations were established advocating the movement of black people from the United States to locations where they would enjoy greater freedom; some endorsed colonization, while others advocated emigration. During the 1820s and 1830s the American Colonization Society (A.C.S.) was the primary vehicle for proposals to return black Americans to greater freedom and equality in Africa, and in 1821 the A.C.S. established the colony of Liberia, assisting thousands of former African-American slaves and free black people (with legislated limits) to move there from the United States. The colonization effort resulted from a mixture of motives with its founder Henry Clay stating; «unconquerable prejudice resulting from their color, they never could amalgamate with the free whites of this country. It was desirable, therefore, as it respected them, and the residue of the population of the country, to drain them off».the Constitution had banned the importation of new African slaves in 1808, and in 1820 slave trade was equated with piracy, punishable by death, the practice of chattel slavery still existed for the next half century. All slaves in only the areas of the Confederate States of America that were not under direct control of the United States government were declared free by the Emancipation Proclamation, which was issued on January 1, 1863 by President Abraham Lincoln. It should be noted that the Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to areas loyal to, or controlled by, the Union, thus the document only freed slaves where the Union still had not regained the legitimacy to do so. Slavery was not actually abolished in the United States until the passage of the 13th Amendment which was declared ratified on December 6, 1865.4 million black slaves were freed in 1865. Ninety-five percent of blacks lived in the South, comprising one third of the population there as opposed to one percent of the population of the North. Consequently, fears of eventual emancipation were much greater in the South than in the North. Based on 1860 census figures, 8% of all white males aged 13 to 43 died in the civil war, including 6% in the North and an extraordinary 18% in the South. Despite this, post-emancipation America was not free from racism; discriminatory practices continued in the United States with the existence of Jim Crow laws, educational disparities and widespread criminal acts against people of color.new century saw a hardening of institutionalized racism and legal discrimination against citizens of African descent in the United States. Although technically able to vote, poll taxes, acts of terror (often perpetuated by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, founded in the Reconstruction South), and discriminatory laws such as grandfather clauses kept black Americans disenfranchised particularly in the South but also nationwide following the Hayes election at the end of the Reconstruction era in 1877. In response to de jure racism, protest and lobbyist groups emerged, most notably, the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) in 1909.time period is sometimes referred to as the nadir of American race relations because racism in the United States was worse during this time than at any period before or since. Segregation, racial discrimination, and expressions of white supremacy all increased. So did anti-black violence, including lynchings and race riots.addition, racism which had been viewed primarily as a problem in the Southern states, burst onto the national consciousness following the Great Migration, the relocation of millions of African Americans from their roots in the Southern states to the industrial centers of the North after World War I, particularly in cities such as Boston, Chicago, and New York (Harlem). In northern cities, racial tensions exploded, most violently in Chicago, and lynchings-mob-directed hangings, usually racially motivated-increased dramatically in the 1920s. As a member of the Princeton chapter of the NAACP, Albert Einstein corresponded with W.E.B. Du Bois, and in 1946 Einstein called racism America's «worst disease».1981 to 1997, the United States Department of Agriculture discriminated against tens of thousands of African American farmers, denying loans provided to white farmers in similar circumstances. The discrimination was the subject of the Pigford v. Glickman lawsuit brought by members of the National Black Farmers Association, which resulted in two settlement agreements of $1.25 billion in 1999 and of $1.15 billion in 2009.cite the 2008 United States presidential election as a step forward in race relations: White Americans played a role in electing Barack Obama, the country's first black president. However, according to exit polls, over sixty percent of white Americans voted for McCain. Racial divisions persisted throughout the election; wide margins of Black voters gave Obama an edge during the presidential primary, where 8 out of 10 African-Americans voted for him in the primaries, and an MSNBC poll showed that race was a key factor in whether a candidate was perceived as being ready for office. In South Carolina, for instance, «Whites were far likelier to name Clinton than Obama as being most qualified to be commander in chief, likeliest to unite the country and most apt to capture the White House in November. Blacks named Obama over Clinton by even stronger margins - two - and three-to one - in all three areas.»the Pacific States, racism was primarily directed against the resident Asian immigrants. Several immigration laws discriminated against the Asians, and at different points the ethnic Chinese or other groups were banned from entering the United States Nonwhites were prohibited from testifying against whites, a prohibition extended to the Chinese by People v. Hall. The Chinese were often subject to harder labor on the First Transcontinental Railroad and often performed the more dangerous tasks such as using dynamite to make pathways through the mountains. The San Francisco Vigilance Movement, although ostensibly a response to crime and corruption, also systematically victimized Irish immigrants, and later this was transformed into mob violence against Chinese immigrants. Anti-Chinese sentiment was also rife in early Los Angeles, culminating in a notorious 1871 riot in which a mob comprising every other nationality then resident in the city.the ensuing inquests and trials, all the perpetrators either were acquitted, or received only light punishments for lesser offenses, because the testimony of Chinese witnesses was either completely inadmissible, or else considered less credible than that of others. Legal discrimination of Asian minorities was furthered with the passages of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned the entrance of virtually all ethnic Chinese immigrants into the United States until 1943.World War II, the United States created internment camps for Japanese American citizens in fear that they would be used as spies for the Japanese. Currently implemented immigration laws are still largely plagued with national origin-based quotas that is unfavorable to Asian countries due to large populations and historically low U.S. immigration rates.of Latin American ancestry (often categorized as «Hispanic») come from a wide variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds. Latinos are not all distinguishable as a racial minority.the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), the U.S. annexed much of the current Southwestern region from Mexico. Mexicans residing in that territory found themselves subject to discrimination. It is estimated that at least 597 Mexicans were lynched between 1848 and 1928 (this is a conservative estimate due to lack of records in many reported lynchings). Mexicans were lynched at a rate of 27.4 per 100,000 of population between 1880 and 1930. This statistic is second only to that of the African American community during that period, which suffered an average of 37.1 per 100,000 populations. Between 1848 to 1879, Mexicans were lynched at an unprecedented rate of 473 per 100,000 of population.The Great Depression, the U.S.government sponsored a Mexican Repatriation program which was intended to encourage Mexican immigrants to voluntarily return to Mexico, however, many were forcibly removed against their will. In total, up to one million persons of Mexican ancestry were deported, approximately 60 percent those individuals were actually U.S. citizens.Zoot Suit Riots were vivid incidents of racial violence against Latinos (e. g. Mexican-Americans) in Los Angeles in 1943. Naval servicemen stationed in a Latino neighborhood conflicted with youth in the dense neighborhood. Frequent confrontations between small groups and individuals had intensified into several days of non-stop rioting. Large mobs of servicemen would enter civilian quarters looking to attack Mexican American youths, some of whom were wearing zoot suits, a distinctive exaggerated fashion popular among that group. The disturbances continued unchecked, and even assisted, by the local police for several days before base commanders declared downtown Los Angeles and Mexican American neighborhoods off-limits to servicemen.public institutions, businesses, and homeowners associations had official policies to exclude Mexican Americans. School children of Mexican American descent were subject to racial segregation in the public school system. In many counties, Mexican Americans were excluded from serving as jurors in court cases, especially in those that involved a Mexican American defendant. In many areas across the Southwest, they lived in separate residential areas, due to laws and real estate company policies.the 1960s, Mexican American youth rallied behind civil rights causes and launched the Chicano Movement.
Conclusion
Literature can play an important role in the formation of various forms of social identity, including national, ethnic, and religious identities. This often happens through a fixation, formal or informal, of literary tradition - in other words the establishment of a rule of literary works. In an attempt to illuminate this aspect of identity formation from an interdisciplinary perspective, we viewed above the story of working on literatures of different periods and geographical areas. Our aim was give the influence work from diverse subjects together in order to throw new light not only on the materials studied, but also on the types of questions asked and the perspectives applied we thing that it was done.value of work was the cross-cultural comparison lies especially in its potential for revealing how our objects of study are created and conditioned through our own analyses. Not only is there much to learn about the different ways in which literature was used for purposes of identity formation, but also about the concepts of literature and ideas of identity that we bring to historical materials and the ways in which we go about our analyses.
Also we viewed about the race concept and race discrimination we learnt that racism has been an integral part of the United States and it has different manifestations in treating the individuals, judging by their skin color, language, culture and ethnical backgrounds the facts which were showed on the literature of USA.the beginning of our work we start with the words of famous philosopher «Everything has beginning and the end», and at the end of work wants to add that the literature hides history of country, which has story of events that country.
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