The history of the American multicultural literature

American novelists were faced with a history of strife and revolution, a geography of vast wilderness, and a fluid and relatively classless democratic society. Many English novels show a poor main character rising on the economic and social ladder, perhaps because of a good marriage or the discovery of a hidden aristocratic past. But this plot does not challenge the aristocratic social structure of England. On the contrary, it confirms it. The rise of the main character satisfies the wish fulfillment of the mainly middle-class readers of those days in England.

In contrast, the American novelist had to depend on his or her own devices. America was, in part, an undefined, constantly moving frontier populated by immigrants speaking various languages and following strange and crude ways of life. Thus, the main character in an American story might find himself alone among cannibal tribes, as in Melville's Typee, or exploring a wilderness like James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking, or witnessing lonely visions from the grave, like Poe's solitary individuals, - or meeting the devil walking in the forest, like Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown. Virtually all the great American protagonists have been "loners." The democratic American individual had, as it were, to invent himself. The serious American novelist had to invent new forms as well: hence the sprawling, idiosyncratic shape of Melville's novel Moby-Dick and Poe's dreamlike, wandering Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

HERMAN MELVILLE (1819-1891)

Herman Melville was a descendant of an old, wealthy family that fell abruptly into poverty upon the death of the father. Despite his upbringing, family traditions, and hard work, Melville found himself with no college education. At 19, he went to sea. His interest in sailors' lives grew naturally out of his own experiences, and most of his early novels grew out of his voyages. His first book, Typee, was based on his time spent among the Taipis people in the Marquesas Islands of the South Pacific.

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, Melville's masterpiece, is the epic story of the whaling ship Pequod and its captain, Ahab, whose obsessive quest for the white whale, Moby-Dick, leads the ship and its men to destruction. This work, a seemingly realistic adventure novel, contains a series of meditations on the human condition.

Whaling, throughout the book, is a grand metaphor for the pursuit of knowledge. Although Ahab's quest is philosophical, it is also tragic. Despite his heroism, Ahab is doomed and perhaps damned in the end. Nature, however beautiful, remains alien and potentially deadly. In Moby-Dick, Melville challenges Emerson's optimistic idea that humans can understand nature. Moby-Dick, the great white whale, is an inscrutable, cosmic existence that dominates the novel, just as he obsesses Ahab. Facts about the whale and whaling cannot explain Moby-Dick; on the contrary, the facts themselves tend to dissolve into symbols. Behind Melville's accumulation of facts is a mystic vision - but whether this vision is evil or good, human or inhuman, is not explained.

Ahab insists on imaging a heroic, timeless world of absolutes. Unwisely, he demands a finished “text,” an answer. But the novel shows that just as there are no finished texts, there are no final answers except, perhaps, death. Certain literary references resonate throughout the novel. Ahab, named for an Old Testament king, desires a total, Faustian, god-like knowledge. Like Oedipus in Sophocles' play, who pays tragically for wrongful knowledge, Ahab is struck blind before he is finally killed.

Ahab's ship Pequod is named for an extinct New England Indian tribe; thus the name suggests that the boat is doomed to destruction. Whaling was in fact a major industry, especially in New England: It supplied whale oil as an energy source, especially for lamps. Thus the whale does literally “shed light” on the universe. The book has historical resonance. Whaling was inherently expansionist and linked with the historical idea of a "manifest destiny" for Americans, since it required Americans to sail round the world in search of whales (in fact, the present state of Hawaii came under American domination because it was used as the major refueling base for American whaling ships). The Pequod's crew members represent all races and various religions, suggesting the idea of America as a universal state of mind, as well as a melting pot. Finally, Ahab embodies the tragic version of democratic American individualism. He asserts his dignity as an individual and dares to oppose the inexorable external forces of the universe.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (born Nathaniel Hathorne; July 4, 1804 - May 19, 1864) was an American novelist and short story writer.

Nathaniel Hathorne was born in 1804 in the city of Salem, Massachusetts to Nathaniel Hathorne and Elizabeth Clarke Manning Hathorne. He later changed his name to "Hawthorne", adding a "w" to dissociate from relatives including John Hathorne, a judge during the Salem Witch Trials. Hawthorne attended Bowdoin College and graduated in 1825; his classmates included future president Franklin Pierce and future poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Hawthorne anonymously published his first work, a novel titled Fanshawe, in 1828. He published several short stories in various periodicals which he collected in 1837 as Twice-Told Tales. The next year, he became engaged to Sophia Peabody. He worked at a Custom House and joined a Transcendentalist Utopian community before marrying Peabody in 1842. The couple moved to The Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, later moving to Salem, the Berkshires, then to The Wayside in Concord. The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850, followed by a succession of other novels. A political appointment took Hawthorne and family to Europe before their return to The Wayside in 1860. Hawthorne died on May 19, 1864, leaving behind his wife and their three children.

Much of Hawthorne's writing centers around New England, many works featuring moral allegories with a Puritan inspiration. His fiction works are considered part of the Romantic movement and, more specifically, dark romanticism. His themes often center on the inherent evil and sin of humanity and his works often have moral messages and deep psychological complexity. His published works include novels, short stories, and a biography of his friend Franklin Pierce.

WALT WHITMAN (1819-1892)

Born on Long Island, New York, Walt Whitman was a part-time carpenter and man of the people, whose brilliant, innovative work expressed the country's democratic spirit. Whitman was largely self-taught; he left school at the age of 11 to go to work, missing the sort of traditional education that made most American authors respectful imitators of the English. His Leaves of Grass (1855), which he rewrote and revised throughout his life, contains "Song of Myself," the most stunningly original poem ever written by an American.

The poem's innovative, unrhymed, free-verse form, open celebration of sexuality, vibrant democratic sensibility, and extreme Romantic assertion that the poet's self was one with the universe and the reader, permanently altered the course of American poetry.

Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 - October 7, 1849) was an American writer, poet, editor and literary critic, and is considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective-fiction genre. He is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.

He was born as Edgar Poe in Boston, Massachusetts; his parents died when he was young. Poe was taken in by John and Frances Allan, of Richmond, Virginia, but they never formally adopted him. After spending a short period at the University of Virginia and briefly attempting a military career, Poe parted ways with the Allans. Poe's publishing career began humbly, with an anonymous collection of poems, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), credited only to "a Bostonian".

Poe switched his focus to prose and spent the next several years working for literary journals and periodicals, becoming known for his own style of literary criticism. His work forced him to move between several cities, including Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City. In Baltimore in 1835, he married Virginia Clemm, his 13-year-old cousin. In January 1845, Poe published his poem "The Raven" to instant success. His wife died of tuberculosis two years later. He began planning to produce his own journal, The Penn (later renamed The Stylus), though he died before it could be produced. On October 7, 1849, at age 40, Poe died in Baltimore; the cause of his death is unknown and has been variously attributed to alcohol, brain congestion, cholera, drugs, heart disease, rabies, suicide, tuberculosis, and other agents. Poe and his works influenced literature in the United States and around the world.

6. Boston Brahmins

Brahma, in Hinduism, is the Supreme Entity of all Matter and Spirit alike. Traditional Hinduism contains five distinct castes or classes of people. A Brahman is a member of the highest, priestly caste. The other castes are, in decreasing status: Kshatriya (rulers/warriors), Vaishya (merchants), Shudra (artisans/servants), and Harijan (outside caste). People are born, married, and die in these castes. Mr. Holmes might have picked Kshatriya or Vaishya as the name for his New England Caste, if only for legacy reasons--some men in these families became eventually known as Merchant Princes in history.

The term "Boston Brahmin" has often been used to describe a group of very wealthy nineteenth century Beacon Hill families. Oliver Wendell Holmes coined the original phrase in 1860. Holmes wrote a series of articles in the Atlantic Monthly called The Professor's Story. In Volume 5, Issue 27, Chapter 1, The Brahmin Caste of New England, he wrote: "There is, however, in New England, an aristocracy, if you choose to call it so, which has a greater character of permanence. It has grown to be a caste--not in any odious sense, but, by the repetition of the same influences, generation after generation, it has acquired a distinct organization and physiognomy...." This series of articles collectively became the novel Elsie Venner, published in 1861.

The object of Elsie Venner was, "an attempt to illustrate the doctrine of inherited moral responsibility for other people's misbehavior." In broad terms, this was an intentional contradiction of certain theological (Calvinist) beliefs such as pre-destination. An unintended consequence of describing a New England Caste of strict progeny, educational, religious, and business practices, was to later make the Brahmin families appear quite elitist.

Many of the Brahmin families had descended from the original Puritan settlers of Massachusetts. Holmes was a descendent of Thomas Dudley, Governor of Massachusetts in 1634, 1640, 1645, and 1650. The most well known wealthy families of nineteenth century Boston include the Appletons, Bacons, Cabots, Codmans, Coolidges, Forbes, Hunnewells, Lodges, Parkmans, Perkins, Russells, and Shaws. Old guide books exist that trace the ancient lineage of these families, and some even trace the lineage of their Beacon Hill addresses.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (a Brahmin Poet, 1807-1882)

Longfellow was born in Portland. He went to Bowdoin College, where, in the later years of his course, a few poems testify to his love of nature and of legend. He was a classmate of Nathaniel Hawthorne, George B. Cheever, and J. S. C. Abbott. Like most of the literary men of his time, he intended to be a lawyer; but the offer of the professorship of modern languages in his college, determined him to go abroad and fit himself for the work. His stay covered two years.

The Voices of the Night, published in 1839, contains some of the very best of his work -- poems whose simple truth and natural expression. render them popular -- The Reaper and the Flowers, Woods in Winter, and The Psalm of Life. The small volume of Ballads, and other Poems, appeared in 1841. The poet's return from Europe, in 1842, was marked by the Poems on Slavery, dedicated to Channing. About this time Longfellow gave a series of lectures on Dante, illustrating them by translations from the work of the great Italian poet.

By the end of the year 1846, he had published the Spanish Student, a collection of translations called The Poets of Europe, and The Belfry of Bruges. The next year is marked by the appearance of Evangeline, the poet's favorite of all his works. Kavanagh, a novel of little power, and a volume of poems called The Seaside and the Fireside, were published in 1849; The Golden Legend, a drama, in 1851. The Song of Hiawatha (1855) raised a storm of enthusiasm and literary controversy as to the cause of its success and its probable permanence. Longfellow called the poem 'An Indian Edda;' the scene was among the Ojibways, near Lake Superior; the meter is rhymeless trochaic tetrameter. The Courtship of Miles Standish was another successful essay in hexameter, followed by The Tales of a Wayside Inn a collection of poems on various subjects; The New England Tragedies, The Divine Tragedy, and The Hanging the Crane (1874).

The closing years of Longfellow's life were rich in friendship and success, but there is an increasing seriousness in all his work. The poem, Morituri Salutamus, which he read. at the fiftieth anniversary of his graduation at Bowdoin, is weighty with feeling. In 1880 came Ultima Thule; in 1881 a sonnet on the death of President Garfield. Hermes Trismegistus was his last poem. He died in 1882, and was buried near the 'three friends'--Charles Sumner, Louis Agassiz, and Cornelius Felton--whom he had loved so dearly and mourned so sincerely. England has honored his genius by giving his bust a place in Westminster Abbey."

Lecture 4. Literature of the critical realism (2^nd half of the 19^th century)

1. New tendencies in literature

After the Civil War, the center of the American nation moved westwards and American tastes followed. The new literary era was one of humor and realism. The new subject matter was the American West.

The trend started with BRET HARTE, another leader of local color realism. He was a New Yorker, who had moved to California during the “Gold Rush” days of 1850s. He achieved his great success with his short story, The Luck of Roaring Camp. It is set in a dirty mining camp, filled with gamblers, prostitutes and drunks during the Gold Rush. The camp and its people are completely changed when a baby is born there. The story combines frontier vulgarity with religious imagery and yet still manages to be funny.

The reading public loved Harte's stories about the Far West and many other writers followed his lead. The real importance of his stories is that they provided the model for all the “Westerns” which have since appeared as novels and movies.

The work of MARK TWAIN (Samuel Clemens, 1835-1910) was the best example of the new outlook. He was one of the first Western writers who were able to create the first “all-American” literature, representing the entire nation.

Being a child Twain could hear many Indian legends and listen to the stories of the black slaves. But the life of the river itself influenced him the most. The arrival of the big steamboats excited his boyhood dreams of adventure.

Like all the Western humorists, Twain's work is filled with stories about how ordinary people trick experts, or how the weak succeed in “hoaxing” the strong. Twain's most famous character, Huck Finn, is a master at this.

In 1867, Twain's newspaper sent him to Europe and the Holy Land. When his letters were published, he became an American literary hero. The letters then became his first major book, The Innocents Abroad (1869). The book clearly shows his “democratic” hatred of the European aristocracy. Although he is critical of Europeans, he is much more critical of American tourists in Europe. He laughs at tourists who pretend to be excited by the art treasures they see there. They are only excited because their guide books tell them they should be. He also attacks tourists in Jerusalem who show false religious feelings. In 1880, Twain tried to write another humorous book about travel in Europe, A Tramp Abroad, but it was not as fresh or as funny as the first one.

The period of the Civil war was a time when a small number of millionaire businessmen held great power in American society. The city homes of the very rich looked like palaces and people thought of this period as a new “Golden Age”. But the gold was only on the surface. Underneath, American society was filled with crime and social injustice. It was, in fact, only a “Gilded Age”: the gold was just a thin layer. Mark Twain created this phrase for his next novel, The Gilded Age (1873), co-written with Charles Warner. It was one of the first novels which tried to describe the new morality (or immorality) of post-Civil War America. One of the elements of this novel is that it creates a picture of the entire nation, rather than of just one region. Although it has a number of Twain's typically humorous characters, the real theme is America's loss of its old idealism. The book describes how a group of young people are morally destroyed by the dream of becoming rich.

Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) was a story about “bad boys”, a popular theme in American literature. The two young heroes, Tom and Huck Finn, are “bad” only because they fight against the stupidity of the adult world. In the end they win. Twain creates a highly realistic background for his story. We get to know the village very well, with its many colorful characters, its graveyards and the house in which there was supposed to be a ghost. Although there are many similarities between Tom and Huck, there are also important differences. Twain studies the psychology of his characters carefully. In his great novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Twain gives his young hero very adult problems. Huck and an escaped slave, Jim, are floating down the Mississippi River on a raft. During their trip, in the various towns and villages along the way, Huck learns about the evil of the world. Huck, meanwhile, is facing a big moral problem. The laws of society say he must return Jim to his “owner”. But, in the most important part of the book, he decides that the slave is a man, not a “thing”. He thinks deeply about morality and then decides to break the law. After that, he is not a child any more. Many see The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as the great novel of American democracy. It shows the basin goodness and wisdom of ordinary people.

2. Southern writers

The South, which was economically and spiritually destroyed by the Civil War, produced very little important literature in the post war years. The best poet was SIDNEY LANIER (1842-1881). He is remembered by his Marshes of Glynn. It describes how a poet becomes closer to nature as he approaches old age. He learns from nature that death the doorway to eternity. Lanier also wrote an important book on how to write poetry, The Science of English Verse.

GEORGE WASHINGTON CABLE (1844-1925) was another Southern writer. He was a close friend of Mark Twain and often toured the country with him, giving lectures. An important “local color” writer, he specialized in the life of the Creoles (French whites living in the New Orleans region). In such stories as Parson Jove, he showed the amusing differences between Creole culture and the neighboring Protestant culture of the South.

JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS was the most interesting Southern writer in the post-Civil war period. Although he was white, he popularized Negro folklore. In his Uncle Remus tales, an old slave tells stories to a white child. They are all animal stories, but all the animals act just like humans. The heroes are usually: a little rabbit and his old enemy fox. They symbolize slaves and their masters.

3. The rise of American realism

William Dean Howells (1837-1920) created the first theory for American realism. He had many important followers. Under him, realism became the “mainstream” of American literature. In 1891, he became the editor of Harper's Monthly in New York City. He made Harper's into a weapon against literary “romanticism”. He felt that such works created false views about life. And as editor, he was able to help younger novelists like Halin Galand and Stephen Crane. He was also a friend and supporter of Mark Twain and Henry James.

Howells put his realist theories into practice in his novels. The theme of A Modern Instance (1882), one of his earlier novels, shocked the public. It was about Divorce, a subject which was not talked and written about openly. His characters are very complex and very unromantic. The author blames society for their troubles. This is a position he took in many of his later novels as well.

Howells's next novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), is about an ordinary, uneducated man who becomes rich in the paint business. It describes his unsuccessful attempt to join Boston's “high society”. In the end, his paint business is ruined because he refuses to cheat other people. The novel contains a famous scene at a dinner party, in which the characters discuss literature.

Howells hates the romantic literature of such popular writers as Frank Stockton (1834-1902) and such historical romances as Ben-Hur (1880, by Lew Wallace). Such novels “make one forget life and all its cares and duties”, he wrote. He realized that business and businessmen were at the center of the society, and felt that novels should depict them. The good realist should be interested in “the common feelings of commonplace people”.

However, in A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), Howells seems to turn away from the “smiling aspects” of society. It is the story of a man who learns about the terrible suffering of poor people in society. From about this time, Howells himself was becoming a kind of socialist. This new outlook made him add a new law to his ideology of realism: art and the artist must serve the poor people of society. From then on, he began attacking the evils of American capitalism. Like Tolstoy, he argued for kindness and the unity of all people in society, rather than selfish competition. A little later, Howells began to write “utopian” novels about an ideal society with perfect justice and happiness. These included A Traveler from Altruria (1894) and Through the Eye of the Needle (1907).

4. Naturalism

In the 1890s, many realists became “naturalists”. “Naturalism” was a term created by the French novelist, Emile Zola. In studying human life, the naturalist used the discoveries and knowledge of modern science. He believed people were not really “free». Rather, their lives, opinions and morality were all controlled by social, economic and psychological causes.

Edward Bellamy (1850-1898) wrote the most famous American “utopian” novels. In his Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888), a man goes to sleep and wakes up in the year 2000. He finds an entirely new society which is much better than his own. The author's purpose is really to criticize capitalist America of the 1880s. He is showing his fellow Americans a picture of how society could be. Today, the book seems a little too optimistic. Bellamy was sure society's problems could be solved by a higher level of industrialization.

Stephen Crane (1871-1900), the first American naturalist, was not much influenced by the scientific approach. He was a genius with amazing sympathy and imagination. He became famous as the author of the novel Maggie: A girl of the Streets (1893). It is a sad story of a girl brought up in a poor area of New York City. She is betrayed by her family and friends and finally has to become a prostitute.

In his short story The Open Boat (1898) Crane shows how even life and death are determined by fate. After a shipwreck, four men struggle to stay alive. In the end, three live and one dies; but again, there is no pattern. Crane was also a good poet. In 1899 he wrote a collection of poems called War Is Kind.

Crane's naturalism caused him to move far away from Howells's “more smiling aspects of life”. In fact, this was the trend for all of the realists. One very important group went in the direction of social criticism. In The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896), for example, Harold Frederic (1856-1898) attacks contemporary religion. Like other novels written in the 1890s, this one expresses deep doubts about the progress of American society.

The naturalism of Hamlin Garland (1860-1940) was filled with a deep sympathy for the common people. His literature was a form of social protest. In such books as Main-Travelled Roads (1891), Garland protests against the conditions which made the lives of Mid-Western farmers so painful and unhappy. At the end of the nineteenth century, Hamlin Garland was describing the failure of the “American Dream”.

Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) was one of America's greatest writers, and its greatest naturalist writers. He and his characters did not attack the nation's puritanical moral code: they simply ignored it. This attitude shocked the reading public when his first novel, Sister Carrie, came out in 1900 and which was suppressed until 1912. The heroine, Carrie Meeber, leaves the poverty of the country home and moves to Chicago. She is completely honest about her desire for a better life. Dreiser himself was born in poverty, and therefore doesn't criticize her for this. Nor does he criticize her relationship with men. Carrie is quite modern in the way she moves from one relationship to another. She tries to be faithful to them, but circumstances make this impossible. Almost by accident, she becomes a success as an actress. In the end, she learns that even money and success are not the keys to true happiness. As in all of his novels, Dreiser's real theme in Sister Carrie is the purposelessness of life.

Dreiser's “Trilogy of Dreiser” -The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914) and The Stoic (published in 1947) - shows a new development in his thinking. He had already found life to be meaningless, and morals to be absurd. Now under the influence of Niezshe, he stressed “the will of power”. The trilogy tells the story of F.A. Cowperwood, a superman of the modern business world. Although he is writing about the achievements of a single, powerful individual, Dreiser does not forget the basic principles of his naturalism. On the one hand, the author says that “the world only moves forward because of the services of the exceptional individual”. But on the other hand, Cowperwood is also a “chessman” of fate. Like Carrie, his success is mostly the result of chance.

Dreiser's greatest novel, An American Tragedy (1925), reveals a third stage in his thinking: social consciousness. Much more than in Sister Carrie, he sees his characters as victims of society. Clyde Griffiths, the main hero (or anti-hero), has the same dream as Carrie: he thinks money and success will bring him happiness. When a pregnant girlfriend threatens to destroy his dreams, he plans to kill her. At the last moment he changes his mind, but the girl dies accidentally anyway. The question is if Clyde is responsible for her death. This becomes the main point during his trial. The trial itself is not really fair. The newspapers stir up public anger against him. In the end, Clyde is executed. Dreiser believes that Clyde is not really guilty. Dreiser calls his novel a tragedy, and in certain ways it is similar to classical Greek tragedy.

Dreiser's novels were very long. They were filled with details about factories, banks, cities and business life. Some people complained about his style. There were too many details, they said and the language was not clear.

Willa Cather (1873-1947) was more conservative. She disagreed with Dreiser's criticism of the society and hated his “detail-piling”. She believed the novel should be without “social furniture” (details about business and politics). The author and reader should concentrate on the emotional life of the central character. Cather's speciality was portraits of the pioneer men and women of Nebraska. She had grown up there, and the values of the old pioneer people were her values. Her famous short story Neighbor Rossicky is about the last days of a simple, hard-working immigrant farmer. After much struggle, he has a successful farm and a loving family. Then he dies and is buried in the Nebraska land he had loved so much. Cather's most famous novels-O Pioneers! The Song of the Lark and My Antonia-all have the same Nebraska setting. Each is a success story. Between 1923 and 1925- in A Lost Lady and The Professor's House- Cather describes the decline and fall of the great pioneer tradition. It is being defeated by a new spirit of commerce and the new kind of man: the businessman. The greed of such people is destroying. After 1927, with her famous Death Comes for the Archbishop, Cather turned to historical fiction. In writing of the past she was trying to escape from the ugliness of the present.

Ellen Glasgow (1874-1945) is often compared with Willa Cather. Both novelists examined the problem of change. Glasgow, who grew up in Virginia, spent her life writing novels about her state's past. The Battle-Ground (1902), The Deliverance (1904), Virginia (1913) and Life and Gabriella.

5. Psychological realism

Henry James (1843-1916) was a realist, but not a naturalist. Unlike Howells and the naturalists, he was not interested in business, politics or the conditions of society. He was an observer of the mind rather than a recorder of the times. His realism was a special kind of psychological realism. Few of his stories include big events or exciting action. In fact, the characters in his last (and finest) novels rarely do anything at all. Things happen to them, but not as a result of their own actions. They watch life more than they live it. We are interested in how their minds respond to the events of the story.

We usually divide James's career as a writer into three stages: early, middle and mature. James developed toward his mature - or fully developed - style rather slowly. The novels of his early period deal with his thoughts and feelings as an American living in Europe. Roderick Hudson (1876) tells of the failure of a young American artist in Italy. Although he has genius, the young man fails because he lacks moral strength. Daisy Miller (1879) is the best novel of James's “middle period”. Again, a young, bright American girl goes to Europe to “explore life”. After many good offers of marriage, she chooses the wrong man. The most important part of the book is where she realizes her mistake. In The Princess Casamassima (1886), the hero is a revolutionary who wants to destroy the European aristocracy. But gradually, he falls in love with the aristocrat's “world of wonderful precious things». This change of heart leads to his suicide. In The Ambassadors (1903), a middle-aged American goes to Paris to rescue the son of a friend from the “evils” of European society. In the end, the boy is happy to be “rescue” and to go back to America. Henry James never tries to give a large, detailed picture of society. Rather, in his stories, he selects a single situation or problem: often the problem is about the nature of art. In his excellent short stories, we can clearly see how this method works. In The Real Thing (1893), the problem is how art changes reality. An artist wants to create a picture of typical aristocrats. When he tries to use real aristocrats as his models, he fails. The real aristocrats are so real that he can't use his imagination. In The Death of the Lion (1894), a famous writer faces the problem of being too popular. He becomes too busy with his admirers to write.

Another kind of problem that Henry James deals with in both his short stories and novels is the “unlived life”. The hero may be so afraid of life that he cannot really live. In The Beast in the Jungle (1903), the hero is sure something terrible is going to happen to him. Much later, he discovers that the terrible fate waiting for him “is that nothing is to happen to him”. A further problem James often studied was the introduction of children to the evil and immorality of the world around them. This is the theme of What Maisie Knew

(1897) and The Turn of the Screw (1898). The latter is a famous ghost story about two children and their nurse. The nurse is sure the children are being haunted by ghosts, but it is not clear to the reader whether these ghosts are real or only in the nurse's mind.

Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) was one of the few important writers in late 19^th century America who was not a realist or a naturalist. The struggles of ordinary people in the everyday world did not interest him. Like Edgar Allan Poe, he loved to describe terrifying events and strange forms of death. His famous sport stories about the Civil War - in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891) and Can Such Things Be? (1893) - are actually horror stories. Irony is an important element in each of them. Bierce is also similar to Poe in his control of details. Each detail in a story is part of the single, clear impression created by the whole story.

Lecture 5. Literature of the critical realism (2^nd half of the 19^th century)

1. Novelists

By the mid- 1880s, well-educated world of the Boston Brahmins was dead. Rich businessmen had replaced them. This change deeply saddened Henry Adams (1838-1918), one of the youngest members of the Brahmin group. Both his grandfather and father Presidents oh the US. He hoped to be the president too. He moved to Washington D.C. in order to make a career in politics. But all his political plans failed. Instead he wrote two novels. The first was Democracy (1880), a satire on the political and social life of the nation's capital. His Esther (1884) was about a cultural education of a young woman. Adams was also good at history. He spent 12 years researching and writing his History of the United States of America during the Administration of Jefferson and Madison. (1889-1891). It is both a work of history and a work of art. The author used a poetic style to help his reader to feel the mood of great events, and he tried to give a scientific interpretation of the forces in human history.

Adams is best remembered for his Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1904). On the surface, it is a guide book to two famous religious sites. But it is a deep study of medieval culture. The author examines architecture, poetry and philosophy of the 12^th and 13^th century.

In The Education of Henry Adams (1907) he describes his education as a journey. First he is in a search of a career, then he is in a search of meaning in the modern world. Both searches end in failure.

At the turn of the centuries, words and phrases like “uncontrollable forces”, “energy”, and “evolution” were appearing in other novels. Writers were greatly influenced by Zola's “scientific” study of man, by Darwin's theory of evolution and by the ideas of the German philosopher Friedrich Niezsche, which attacked Christianity. Writers at the turn of the century were beginning to think about traditional social morality in a new way. Traditional values were based on the idea of the personal responsibility: the individual can and must choose between good and evil. But now writers were asking whether the individual could really make such a choice. When they looked at the many outside forces influencing a person, the area of individual choice and responsibility seemed quite small. Niezsche suggested that there were also other forces which work inside the individual. Each person, he said, has a “will of power”. This “will” is “beyond good and evil”. It is a force of nature, like hunger, or sex.

The novels of Frank Norris (1870-1902) are clearly influenced by this new way of thinking. His characters are often unable to control their own lives. The whole world, natural and human, is a battlefield between uncontrollable forces.

The Octopus (1901) is a novel about a battle between California wheat farmers and the Southern Pacific Railroad. As in The Mc Teage, we see the conflict between the power of nature (the farmers) and the mechanical forces (the railroad). The farmers are defeated by “inevitable” economic forces. In the octopus and then in The Pit (1903), Norris uses wheat as a symbol of life. He makes it almost a religious symbol. In this sense he is different from the “scientific” naturalists. His writing style is also different from that from the other naturalists. Many of his techniques for description (his repetitious and powerful language) seem closer to such romantic writers as Hawthorne.

Jack London.

Jack London (1876-1916), like Norris, was deeply influenced by Darwin's ideas of constant struggle in nature and the “survival of the fittest”. Not surprisingly, the heroes of some of his stories are animals. In his famous Call of the Wild (1903) the dog, Buck, is taken from his easy life in California and brought to the frozen environment of Alaska. He survives because he is a “superior individual”. In the end he returns to the world of his ancestors. He became a leader of a pack of wolves. Wolf Larsen, the hero of The Sea-Wolf, is not simply a man, he is a superman. The beautiful poetess Maude Brewster becomes fascinated with him after he rescues her and takes her on board his ship. His knowledge of the sea makes him seem like a master of nature. But in the end, even this superman dies. London himself once explained that this point was that a man like Wolf Larson could not survive in modern society.

The laws of nature govern everything and everybody inside or outside society in London's novels. Sometimes people are defeated by these laws. In his great story, To Build a Fire (1910) a man stupidly goes out into the terrible cold of an Alaskan storm. Since he has matched, he thinks he can build a fire any time. But in the end Alaskan nature defeats him and he freezes to death.

2. Pragmatism

The turn of the century was an exciting moment in American intellectual history. American novelists and poets were no longer copying British and European writers. They were now sharing ideas with the whole world. America was about to become an important contributor to world literature. A similar thing was happening in philosophy and sociology. John Dewey (1859-1952) and William James (1842-1910) developed their philosophy of “Pragmatism”. They believed that there are no fixed truths; and that the ideas are instruments which are useful only when they help change society. William James, Henry James's elder brother, greatly influenced European philosophers with his Varieties of Religious Experience, and especially his Pragmatism. In sociology, Thorstein Veblen made an important contribution to the growing attack on the capitalist economic and social system with his Theory of the Leisure Class. According to this theory, America's very rich do not produce the wealth of the nation; they simply use it. American economic system, Velben says, encourages competition in making money rather than in making products. After they have made their money, the rich use it wastefully. They buy expensive things in order to show other people how rich they are.

3. Social novelists

Inexpensive, popular magazines like McClure's, Everybody's, Cosmopolitan sent their reporters out to find the wrong-doers of politics and business. The job of these reporters was to print the truth, however unpleasant, in their magazines. They quickly moved from magazine articles to books. In the book by Ida Tarbell (1857-1944) “History of the Standard Oil Company” attacks the method John D. Rockefeller used to crush his competitors. David G. Phillips (1867-1911) covered all kids of social evils, from politics to finance. Some writers, like Lincoln Steffens (1866-1936), had a social philosophy very close to that of the naturalist novelists. Some writers, like the novelist Robert Herrick (1868-1938), seemed to have a tragic view of life. In “The Common Lot” and other novels, he describes the evil growth of the commercial spirit in America, from 1890s. In great sadness, he says that the soul of the middle class is being destroyed. These people now lead empty, meaningless lives .Like many writers after him Herrick seemed to be filled with hopelessness and despair.

Upton Sinclair was the opposite of Herrick. He believed in human goodness and was sure society could be changed. His greatest novel, The Jungle, was a successful weapon in his fight for justice. It tells the story of an immigrant family, the Redkuses, who come to America with dreams of a better way of life. But they only experience a series of horrors and tragedies. Sinclair shows the terrible conditions the family experience in Chicago's meat-packing industry. Jack London described the novel as “The Uncle Tom's Cabin of wage-slavery”. Indeed, it did have a similar practical effect. Millions of Americans were shocked by these descriptions. All attention forced the reform of America's food industry. As literature, The Jungle is not very satisfactory. In almost all of his many novels, Sinclair's characters seem very flat and lifeless. But perhaps Sinclair's main interest was not as much in his characters as in his message. His novels were always a form of propaganda. They tried to force society to change.

This period gave the world one more writer of interest, O. Henry (1862-1910). During 1904 and 1905 he wrote one short story a week. His first collection of stories, Cabbages and Kings (1904), made him a popular hero. He usually used his own experiences as ideas for stories. Like M. Twain, he wrote in an easy-to-understand, journalistic style. His stories begin with action and move quickly toward their conclusion. They are filled with deep, loving portraits of the lives of ordinary people. The plots often seem to be written according to a formula. One such formula is the “reversal”: an action by a character produces the opposite effect from the one he had been hoping for (kidnapping). Another O. Henry formula is to keep an important piece of information from the reader until the very end. In 1914, the New York Times praised his story Municipal Report. But the author wasn't satisfied with his stories, though millions of people liked them.

American newspapers and magazines had become very powerful by this period. They were patriotic; they wanted the US to grow in strength. Some historians say that the Spanish-American War (1898) was started by American journalists. The newspapers wanted something excited to write about. Stephen Crane and Frank Norris were correspondents in the war. Correspondents like Richard Harding Davis pleased readers with stories of courage and red blood. Davis's descriptions of battle were particularly good, like the battle of Santiago. He later collected his reports into his very popular Notes of a War Correspondent (1910). Each report told the tale of a courageous hero; sometimes a solder, sometimes a journalist. Like Hemingway, who also started as a war correspondent, Davis was admired by women readers.

Lafcadio Hearn also began as a newspaper writer. He was born in Greece and his father was British. At 19 he arrived in America without any money, and had to find a way to make a living. Soon he was a reporter for the Enquirer and later, on a New Orleans paper. His best writing described mood rather than action. He liked the contrast between brilliant light and darkness. Later he came to Caribbean islands. In his Martinique Sketches (1890), he painted this world of sunshine and bright colors with words. His best descriptions are like romantic photographs. But the world knows him best when he went to Japan and changed his name into “Koizumi Yakumo”. He also changed his style and subject matter. He had always been interested in legends and folk tales. Now he began collecting Japanese ghost stories. To tell these tails-in such books as In Ghostly Japan and Kwaidan - he departed from his old poetic style and began using words simply. He began writing for the ear, rather than for the mind's eye.

Hearn didn't simply translate the stories, he made them into a new kind of literature. The Japanese love him for this. Although Hearn admired Japan, he wrote about both the good and the bad of the country. In Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation, he praised its old society and criticized its new industrial society. He also predicted the conflict between Japan and the West. But in the history of American literature, he is the man who made the legends and tales of an unknown culture a part of American literature.

4. The Muckrakers Era

A muckraker is an individual who seeks to expose or reveal the real or apparent corruption of businesses or governments to the public. The term originates from members of the Progressive movement in America who wanted to expose the corruption and scandals in government and business. Muckrakers often wrote about impoverished people and took aim at the established institutions of society.

History: Muckrakers were a significant part of reform in the United States because of the freedom of the press provided for by the First Amendment of the Constitution. They played a huge role in the social justice movements for reform, and the campaigns to clean up cities and states, by constantly reporting and publicizing the dark corners of American society.

Beginnings: Investigative Journalism in the late 19th Century

The period of the 1890s saw the growth of the Progressive movement in the United States. Investigative journalists were an important force in the progressive movement, and one of the most powerful mediums for these investigative journalists and writers arose in the 1890s with the rapidly increasing sales of cheap magazines.

Writer and photographer Jacob August Riis published his expose, How the Other Half Lives, in 1891, thoroughly detailing the substandard conditions (such as lack of light, poor air circulation, etc.) in the slums and tenement buildings of New York City.

Origin of the Term "Muckraker"

The period 1900-1902 saw an increase in the kind of reporting that would come to be called "muckraking." By the 1900s, magazines such as Cosmopolitan, The Independent, Munsey's and McClure's were already in wide circulation and read avidly by the growing middle class.

The term "muckraker" was first used in a speech on April 14, 1906 by President Theodore Roosevelt: “In Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress you may recall the description of the Man with the Muck-rake, the man who could look no way but downward with the muck-rake in his hands; Who was offered a celestial crown for his muck-rake, but who would neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered, but continued to rake to himself the filth of the floor.” This first reference to "muckrakers" is believed to have been with the Hearst magazines and newspapers in mind.

Roosevelt saw benefits and disadvantages to muckraking activity. He declared that although these men did good work when they scraped up the `filth' of America, "the man who did nothing else was certain to become a force of evil.” On the other hand, he said, "I hail as a benefactor…every writer or speaker, every man who, on the platform, or in book, magazine, or newspaper, with merciless severity makes such attack, provided always that he in turn remembers that that attack is of use only if it absolutely truthful”.

The term eventually came to be used to depict investigative journalists who exposed the dark corners and all the corruption of American public life, especially in corporate America.

As mentioned before, the Muckrakers were part of the social justice movement during the Progressive era. During this time period, these journalists, through their research and constant exposure of the wrongdoing by officials in American public life, gave fuel to protests that led to investigations and later on reform of not only Corporate America but the American Government. The Muckrakers' journalistic efforts helped reform and regulate Wall Street and aspects of big businesses. The muckrakers also shed light on an array of social issues, such as the issues with urban housing and horrible living conditions in highly populated cities, medical patents, child labor laws, child prostitution, and even women's rights.

Lecture 6. Literature of the “lost generation” (20-30s of the 20^th century)

1. Self-criticism

As the new century entered its second decade, the forward movement of American literature seemed to have stopped. The realistic novels were beginning to seem old-fashioned. The novels of Winston Churchill (1871-1947) were typical of the tastes of the American reading public. His most popular works-The Crisis and The Crossing - had old-fashioned, romantic plots. They expressed sadness at the passing of the aristocratic culture of the South after the Civil War. Also popular was James Branch Cable (1879-1958). His novels were romantic, written in an elegant, 19^th -century prose style. In them he helped his readers escape from the reality of the present into an unreal past. In such novels and collections of stories as Gallantry, Chivalry and the Soul of Melicent, he succeeded in his desire to “write beautifully of beautiful happenings”. Although his books are often delightful in themselves, they did not provide the new direction needed by the new generation of American writers.

Starting in 1915 the critic Van Wyck Brooks opened a period of “self-criticism”, in which writers looked at what was wrong with the nation and its literature. Brooks knew that such literary criticism would sooner or later become social criticism. He wrote that the American life was divided between the businessman (who only thinks of making money) and the intellectual (who only has unpractical theories and ideas). But because they don't understand each other, there is no “middle ground” where they can meet. The new generation of American writers must construct this “middle ground”.