The history of the American multicultural literature

Young writers took notice of Brooks's criticism. The result was the trend “new realism”, which lasted up to the 1950s. It made American literature one of the most exciting and influential literatures of the world. Brooks reviewed and reorganized American literature. He wrote famous biographies of Mark Twain and Henry James. His theory was that they were failures because their environment had prevented their development as true artists.

American readers were beginning to lose their fear of those who looked below the surface of human relationships. Intelligent readers were now able to accept even ugly truths about human nature. In 1919, Sigmund Freud had given a famous lecture series in America. This series was both a liberation and an inspiration for American artists. But even before Freud's arrival, two American novelists were starting to destroy the “double Standard” of America's puritanical morality: Edith Wharton and Theodore Dreiser.

Edith Wharton (1862- 1937) was born in an old New York family. She married a man of her own class, but later she left him and moved to Europe to begin a career as a writer. All of her stories are set in the puritanical world of the upper classes. Many people notice a strong similarity between her stories and those of her friend and teacher Henry James. They both wrote psychological novels, usually about the problems of women in upper-class society. However, Wharton's style is more direct than James's. She can describe a whole way of life by describing a few surface details, and in a few words she can “catch” (often humorously) the personality of her characters. Many of Wharton's novels are about the life and customs of upper-class society. But angry social criticism is not far beneath the surface. The life of Lily Bart, heroine of The House of Mirth, is actually a battle. She has been brought up to see herself as a decorative object for wealthy men. But she hates spending time with them. When she tries to act with a little bit of freedom, society rejects her as immoral. In the end, she fails to get a husband, and kills herself. The heroine of The House of the Country is quite open about her own sexual desires. She knows exactly how to use her attractions to get a wealthy husband. Wharton is attacking here the Victorian world of her own youth. She continuous her theme of dishonesty about one's emotions and sexual feelings in her most famous novel Ethan Frome (1911). The theme is not expressed directly. Instead it lies just below the surface in scenes of great tension. Ethan, a New England farmer, has a cold unsatisfactory relation with his wife. A young cousin, Mattie, comes to live with them. Ethan and the girl Mattie are drawn to each other. But in scene after scene we see them denying their desires. Finally they try to kill themselves, but they fail. In the end Mattie (now cripple), Ethan (now elderly) and the wife all share a strange and terrible life together in the tiny farmhouse. The Reef and Summer are two more novels about sexual passion. In all of her works, the natural instincts of people are crushed by an untruthful society. But her characters still have room for moral choice. This makes her different from the pure naturalists writers like Crane and Dreiser.

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.

2. American modernist literature

Modernist literature in America dealt with such topics as racial relationships, gender roles and sexuality, to name just a few. It reached its peak in America in the 1920s up to the 1940s. Among the representative writers of the period we may find Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, although one should mention also Walt Whitman, who, even if he belongs to the 19th century poets, is sometimes regarded as a pioneer of the modernist era in America.

Black writers need to be mentioned when talking about modernism in America, as they seem to have brought a breakthrough in literature and mentality, as far as the self-esteem of Afro-Americans is concerned. The folk-oriented poetry of Sterling Brown and Langston Hughes, for example, written in a rhythm fit to be either sung or told as a story, melancholically describes the joyful attitude of Afro-Americans towards life, in spite of all the hardships they were confronted with. The protagonists of these poems are shown in such a light which offers insight into their cultural identity and folklore. An insight into culture and folklore is also a topic that prose deals with, such as, for example, Jean Toomer's "Blood-Burning Moon" and William Faulkner's "That Evening Sun".

Racial relations between blacks and whites, the gap between what was expected of each of the two and what the actual facts were, or, better said, prejudice in the society of the time are themes dealt with in most of the modernist American literature, whether we speak about prose (Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway), or about drama Eugene O'Neil. In other words, such stereotypes as the lack of education, the poor use of the English language and their portrayal in a dangerous light are not dealt away with, on the contrary, they are still present during the modernist period, as far as literature is concerned. However, with Ernest Hemingway's "The Battler", for example, there seems to be a reversal of stereotypes. The Afro-American character in this short story proves out to be a kind, calculated and polite man, whose good manners and carefully chosen vocabulary are easily noticeable from the first moment he appears in the story.

Madness and its manifestations in the human being seems to be another favorite theme of American modernist writers. Eugene O'Neil's "Emperor Jones", Ernest Hemingway's "The Battler" and William Faulkner's "That Evening Sun", all deal to a certain extent with this topic.

The modernist period also brought changes to the portrayal of gender roles and especially to women's role in society. It is an era under the sign of emancipation and change in society, issues which reflect themselves in the literature of the period, as well. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby", for example, deals with such topics as gender interaction in a mundane society.

Influenced by the first World War, American modernist writers, such as Ernest Hemingway, offer an insight into the psychological wounds and spiritual scars of the war experience. The economic crisis in America at the beginning of the 1930s also left a mark on the literary creations of the period, such as John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath". Nevertheless, all these negative aspects led to new hopes and aspirations, and to the search for a new beginning, not only for the contemporary individuals, but also for the fictional characters in American modernist literature.

Many historians have characterized the period between the two world wars as the United States' traumatic "coming of age," despite the fact that U.S. direct involvement was relatively brief (1917-1918) and its casualties many fewer than those of its European allies and foes. Shocked and permanently changed, Americans soldiers returned to their homeland, but could never regain their innocence. Nor could soldiers from rural America easily return to their roots. After experiencing the world, many now yearned for a modern, urban life.

In the postwar “big boom,” business flourished, and the successful prospered beyond their wildest dreams. For the first time, many Americans enrolled in higher education - in the 1920s college enrollment doubled. The middle-class prospered; Americans began to enjoy the world's highest national average income in this era.

Americans of the “Roaring Twenties” fell in love with modern entertainments. Most people went to the movies once a week. Although Prohibition - a nationwide ban on the sale of alcohol instituted through the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution - began in 1919, illegal “speakeasies” (bars) and nightclubs proliferated, featuring jazz music, cocktails, and daring modes of dress and dance. Dancing, movie going, automobile touring, and radio were national crazes. American women, in particular, felt liberated. They cut their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short "flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, passed in 1920. They boldly spoke their mind and took public roles in society.

In spite of this prosperity, Western youths on the cultural “edge” were in a state of intellectual rebellion, angry and disillusioned with the savage war, as well as the older generation they held responsible. Ironically, difficult postwar economic conditions in Europe allowed Americans with dollars - like writers F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound - to live abroad handsomely on very little money, and to soak up the postwar disillusionment, as well as other European intellectual currents, particularly Freudian psychology and to a lesser extent Marxism.

Numerous novels, notably Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926) and Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise (1920), evoke the extravagance and disillusionment of what American expatriate writer Gertrude Stein dubbed "the lost generation." In T.S. Eliot's influential long poem "The Waste Land" (1922), Western civilization is symbolized by a bleak desert in desperate need of rain (spiritual renewal). These people include Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Cummings, Sinclair Lewis, H. L. Mencken, Sherwood Anderson, Eugene O'Neill.

It is said that people in the 1920s believed in everything, people in the 1930s believed in one thing, and people in the 1940s believed in nothing.

Robert Frost (1874--1963) was born in San Francisco, but known as a New England poet. When he was 10, his father died of T. B. and the family carried his body to be buried in New England, and they were too poor to go back to San Francisco.

Frost entered Dartmouth College, but soon left; later on he tried college again at Harvard, but left at the end of two years, bearing an enduring dislike for academic convention. Then he lived by farming, at the same time writing poetry. He got T. B., and began to live in the countryside at the suggestion of a doctor. He used to say he was one and a half men--a half teacher, a half farmer, and a half poet.

It took 20 years for him to get recognition. His first volume of poetry was published in England in 1913, with the help of Ezra Pound, which was entitled A Boy's Will. When he went back to his home country, he found himself famous. He later received honorary degrees from 44 colleges and universities, won the Pulitzer Prize four times, and was invited to read his poem at the inauguration of President J. F. Kennedy in 1961.

3. Experimentation

Experimentation 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 labeled a group of American literary notables who lived in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s as the "Lost Generation".

The 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.

American 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.

Five 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".

Depression 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.

Henry Miller assumed a unique place in American Literature in the 1930s when his semi-autobiographical novels, written and published in Paris, were banned from the US. Although his major works, which include Tropic of Cancer (novel) and Black Spring, wouldn't be cleared for American sale and publication until 1962, their themes and stylistic innovations had already exerted a major influence on succeeding generations of American writers.

4. Imagism

Imagism was a movement in early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery, and clear, sharp language. The Imagists rejected the sentiment and discursiveness typical of much Romantic and Victorian poetry. This was in contrast to their contemporaries, the Georgian poets, who were by and large content to work within that tradition. Group publication of work under the Imagist name appearing between 1914 and 1917 featured writing by many of the most significant figures in modernist poetry in English, as well as a number of other Modernist figures prominent in fields other than poetry.

Based in London, the Imagists were drawn from Great Britain, Ireland and the United States. Somewhat unusually for the time, the Imagists featured a number of women writers among their major figures. Imagism is also significant historically as the first organised Modernist English language literary movement or group. In the words of T. S. Eliot: "The point de repиre usually and conveniently taken as the starting-point of modern poetry is the group denominated 'imagists' in London about 1910."

At the time Imagism emerged, Longfellow and Tennyson were considered the paragons of poetry, and the public valued the sometimes moralising tone of their writings. In contrast, Imagism called for a return to what were seen as more Classical values, such as directness of presentation and economy of language, as well as a willingness to experiment with non-traditional verse forms. The focus on the "thing" as "thing" (an attempt at isolating a single image to reveal its essence) also mirrors contemporary developments in avant-garde art, especially Cubism. Although Imagism isolates objects through the use of what Ezra Pound called "luminous details", Pound's Ideogrammic Method of juxtaposing concrete instances to express an abstraction is similar to Cubism's manner of synthesizing multiple perspectives into a single image.

The American poet Ezra Pound was introduced to the group in April 1909, and found that their ideas were close to his own. In particular, Pound's studies of Romantic literature had led him to an admiration of the condensed, direct expression that he detected in the writings of Arnaut Daniel, Dante, and Guido Cavalcanti, amongst others. For example, in his 1911-12 series of essays I gather the limbs of Osiris, Pound writes of Daniel's line "pensar de lieis m'es repaus" ("it rests me to think of her") (from the canzone En breu brizara'l temps braus): "You cannot get statement simpler than that, or clearer, or less rhetorical".^[6] These criteria of directness, clarity and lack of rhetoric were to be amongst the defining qualities of Imagist poetry. Through his friendship with Laurence Binyon, Pound had already developed an interest in Japanese art and he quickly became absorbed in the study of Japanese verse forms.

In a 1928 letter to the French critic and translator Renй Taupin, Pound was keen to emphasise another ancestry for Imagism, pointing out that Hulme was, in many ways, indebted to a Symbolist tradition, linking back via William Butler Yeats, Arthur Symons and the Rhymers' Club generation of British poets to Mallarmй.^[7] In 1915, Pound edited the poetry of another '90s poet, Lionel Johnson for the publisher Elkin Mathews. In his introduction, he wrote

Early publications and statements of intent

In 1911, Pound introduced two other poets to the Eiffel Tower group, his former fiancйe Hilda Doolittle (who had started signing her work H.D.) and her future husband Richard Aldington. These two were interested in exploring Greek poetic models, especially Sappho, an interest that Pound shared. The compression of expression that they achieved by following the Greek example complemented the proto-Imagist interest in Japanese poetry, and, in 1912, during a meeting with them in the British Museum tea room, Pound told H.D. and Aldington that they were Imagistes, and even appended the signature H.D. Imagiste to some poems they were discussing.

When Harriet Monroe started her Poetry magazine in 1911, she had asked Pound to act as foreign editor. In October 1912, he submitted three poems each by H.D. and Aldington under the Imagiste rubric. That same month, Pound's book Ripostes was published with an appendix called The Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme which carried a note that saw the first appearance of the word Imagiste in print. Aldington's poems, Choricos, To a Greek Marble, and Au Vieux Jardin, were in the November issue of Poetry and H.D.'s, Hermes of the Ways, Orchard, and Epigram, appeared in the January 1913 issue; Imagism as a movement was launched. Poetry's April issue published what came to be seen as "Imagism's enabling text", the haiku-like poem of Ezra Pound entitled "In a Station of the Metro":

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

The March issue of Poetry also contained Pound's A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste and Flint's Imagisme. The latter contained this succinct statement of the group's position:

1. Direct treatment of the "thing", whether subjective or objective.

2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.

3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome.

Pound's note opened with a definition of an image as that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. Pound goes on to state that It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works. His list of don'ts reinforced Flint's three statements, while warning that they should not be considered as dogma but as the result of long contemplation. Taken together, these two texts comprised the Imagist programme for a return to what they saw as the best poetic practice of the past.

Des Imagistes

Determined to promote the work of the Imagists, and particularly of Aldington and H.D., Pound decided to publish an anthology under the title Des Imagistes. This was published in 1914 by the Poetry Bookshop in London, and became one of the most important and influential English language collections. Included in the thirty-seven poems were ten poems by Aldington, seven by H.D., and six by Pound. The book also included work by Flint, Skipwith Cannell, Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Allen Upward and John Cournos.

Pound's editorial choices were based on what he saw as the degree of sympathy that these writers displayed with Imagist precepts, rather than active participation in a group as such. Williams, who was based in the United States, had not participated in any of the discussions of the Eiffel Tower group. However, he and Pound had long been corresponding on the question of the renewal of poetry along similar lines. Ford was included at least partly because of his strong influence on Pound as the younger poet made the transition from his earlier, Pre-Raphaelite influenced, style towards a harder, more modern way of writing. The inclusion of a poem by Joyce, I Hear an Army which was sent to Pound by W.B. Yeats, took on a wider importance in the history of literary modernism as the subsequent correspondence between the two led to the serial publication, at Pound's behest, of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in The Egoist. Joyce's poem is not written in free verse, but in rhyming quatrains. However, it strongly reflects Pound's interest in poems written to be sung to music, such as the troubadours and Cavalcanti. The book met with little popular or critical success, at least partly because it had no introduction or commentary to explain what the poets were attempting to do, and a number of copies were returned to the publisher.

Some Imagist Poets

The following year, Pound and Flint fell out over their different interpretations of the history and goals of the group arising from an article on the history of Imagism written by Flint and published in The Egoist in May 1915. Flint was at pains to emphasise the contribution of the Eiffel Tower poets, especially Storer. Pound, who believed that the "Hellenic hardness" that he saw as the distinguishing quality of the poems of H.D. and Aldington was likely to be diluted by the "custard" of Storer, was to play no further direct role in the history of the Imagists. He went on to co-found the Vorticists with his friend the painter and writer Wyndham Lewis.

Around this time, the American Imagist Amy Lowell moved to London, determined to promote her own work and that of the other Imagist poets. Lowell was a wealthy heiress from Boston who loved Keats and cigars. She was also an enthusiastic champion of literary experiment who was willing to use her money to publish the group. Lowell was determined to change the method of selection from Pound's autocratic editorial attitude to a more democratic manner. This new editorial policy was stated in the Preface to the first anthology to appear under her leadership: "In this new book we have followed a slightly different arrangement to that of our former Anthology. Instead of an arbitrary selection by an editor, each poet has been permitted to represent himself by the work he considers his best, the only stipulation being that it should not yet have appeared in book form." The outcome was a series of Imagist anthologies under the title Some Imagist Poets. The first of these appeared in 1915, planned and assembled mainly by H.D. and Aldington. Two further issues, both edited by Lowell, were published in 1916 and 1917. These three volumes featured most of the original poets with the exception of Pound, who had tried to persuade her to drop the Imagist name from her publications and who sardonically dubbed this phase of Imagism "Amy-gism."

Lowell persuaded D. H. Lawrence to contribute poems to the 1915 and 1916 volumes, making him the only writer to publish as both a Georgian poet and an Imagist. Marianne Moore also became associated with the group during this period. However, with World War I as a backdrop, the times were not easy for avant-garde literary movements (Aldington, for example, spent much of the war at the front), and the 1917 anthology effectively marked the end of the Imagists as a movement.

The Imagists after Imagism

In 1929, Walter Lowenfels jokingly suggested that Aldington should produce a new Imagist anthology. Aldington, by now a successful novelist, took up the suggestion and enlisted the help of Ford and H.D. The result was the Imagist Anthology 1930, edited by Aldington and including all the contributors to the four earlier anthologies with the exception of Lowell, who had died, Cannell, who had disappeared, and Pound, who declined. The appearance of this anthology initiated a critical discussion of the place of the Imagists in the history of 20th-century poetry.

Of the poets who were published in the various Imagist anthologies, Joyce, Lawrence and Aldington are now primarily remembered and read as novelists. Marianne Moore, who was at most a fringe member of the group, carved out a unique poetic style of her own that retained an Imagist concern with compression of language. William Carlos Williams developed his poetic along distinctly American lines with his variable foot and a diction he claimed was taken "from the mouths of Polish mothers". Both Pound and H.D. turned to writing long poems, but retained much of the hard edge to their language as an Imagist legacy. Most of the other members of the group are largely forgotten outside the context of the history of Imagism.

Legacy

Despite the movement's short life, Imagism would deeply influence the course of modernist poetry in English. Aldington, in his 1941 memoir, writes: "I think the poems of Ezra Pound, H.D., Lawrence, and Ford Madox Ford will continue to be read. And to a considerable extent T. S. Eliot and his followers have carried on their operations from positions won by the Imagists." On the other hand, Wallace Stevens found shortcomings in the Imagist approach: "Not all objects are equal. The vice of imagism was that it did not recognize this."

The influence of Imagism can be seen clearly in the work of the Objectivist poets,^[23] who came to prominence in the 1930s under the auspices of Pound and Williams. The Objectivists worked mainly in free verse. Clearly linking Objectivism's principles with Imagism's, Louis Zukofsky insisted, in his introduction to the 1931 Objectivist issue of Poetry, on writing "which is the detail, not mirage, of seeing, of thinking with the things as they exist, and of directing them along a line of melody." Zukofsky was a major influence on the Language poets, who carried the Imagist focus on formal concerns to a high level of development. Basil Bunting, another Objectivist poet, was a key figure in the early development of the British Poetry Revival, a loose movement that also absorbed the influence of the San Francisco Renaissance poets.

Imagism influenced a number of poetry circles and movements in the 1950s, especially the Beat generation, the Black Mountain poets, and others associated with the San Francisco Renaissance. In his seminal 1950 essay, Projective Verse, Charles Olson, the theorist of the Black Mountain group, wrote "ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION"; his credo derived from and supplemented the Imagists.

Among the Beats, Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg in particular were influenced by the Imagist emphasis on Chinese and Japanese poetry. William Carlos Williams was another who had a strong impact on the Beat poets, encouraging poets like Lew Welch and writing an introduction for the book publication of Ginsberg's Howl (1955).

Karl Edd, a Denver Colorado poet identifying himself as an Imagist, was active in the 60s and 70s and published various 'point of view' collections based around characters such as Booker T. Washington and Billy the Kid. He also published anthologies of Colorado poets entitled "Mustang Review." Edd was a member of the Colorado Author's League, and received their Poetry Award in 1969-1970 for his poems "Sometime" and "I Stood Morning Watch." Many of his works are held by the Denver Public Library.

Lecture 7. Literature of the post-world war ii period

1. The Turning Point of American Literature

The period in time from the end of World War II up until, roughly, the late 1960s and early 1970s saw to the publication of some of the most popular works in American history. The last few of the more realistic Modernists along with the wildly Romantic Beatniks largely dominated the period, while the direct respondents to America's involvement in World War II contributed in their notable influence.

Though born in Canada, Chicago-raised Saul Bellow would become the most influential novelist in America in the decades following World War II. In works like The Adventures of Augie March and Henderson the Rain King, Bellow painted vivid portraits of the American city and the distinctive characters peopling it. Bellow went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976.

From J.D. Salinger's "Nine Stories" and "The Catcher in the Rye" to Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar", America's madness was placed to the forefront of the nation's literary expression. Йmigrй Authors such as Vladimir Nabokov, with "Lolita", forged on with the theme, and, at almost the same time, the Beatniks took a concerted step away from their Lost Generation predecessors.

Regarding the war novel specifically, there was a literary explosion in America during the post-World War II era. Some of the most well known of the works produced included Norman Mailer's "The Naked and the Dead" (1948), Joseph Heller's "Catch-22" (1961) and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s "Slaughterhouse-Five" (1969). "MacBird", written by Barbara Garson, was another well-received work exposing the absurdity of war.

In contrast, John Updike showcased what could be called the more idyllic side of American life, approaching it from a quiet, but subversive writing style. His 1960 book Rabbit, Run broke new ground on its release by its characterization and detail of the American middle class. It is also credited as one of the first novels to ever use the present tense in its narration.

Ralph Ellison's 1953 novel “Invisible Man” was instantly recognized as among the most powerful and sensational works of the immediate post-war years. The story of a black man in the urban north, the novel laid bare the often repressed racial tension still prevailing in the nation while also succeeding as an existential character study.

Flannery O'Connor (b. March 25, 1925 in Georgia - d. August 3, 1964 in Georgia) also explored and developed the theme of 'the South' in American literature that was dear to Mark Twain and other leading authors of American literary history ("Wise Blood" 1952; "The Violent Bear It Away" 1960; "Everything That Rises Must Converge" - her best known short story, and an eponymous collection published posthumously in 1965).

2. The New Criticism in America

From the 1930s to the 1960s, New Criticism became a critical force in the United States. It was the most powerful perspective in American literary criticism. The representatives were John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren. "The influential critical methods these poet-professors developed emphasized the sharpening of close reading skills. New Criticism privileged the evaluation of poetry as the justification of literary scholarship". "Brooks and Warren's Understanding Poetry" (1938) became one of the most influential college poetry textbooks of the 1930s and continued to be revised and reprinted well into the 1970s" (Morrisson: 29).

New Criticism showed itself in such works as Eliot's and Yeats' poems. "Poetry that best fit the aesthetic criteria of the New Critics was emphasized in important classroom teaching anthologies" (Morrisson: 29).T. S. Eliot redefined tradition in his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent". He formulated such critical concepts as "objective correlative", and rethought the literary canon in his elevation of Jacobean drama and metaphysical poetry. His work had a fundamental influence on New Criticism in America.

3. African American literature

African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. The genre traces its origins to the works of such late 18th century writers as Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano, reaching early high points with slave narratives and the Harlem Renaissance, and continuing today with authors such as Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and Walter Mosley being ranked among the top writers in the United States. 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. African American writing has also tended to incorporate within itself oral forms such as spirituals, sermons, gospel music, blues and rap.

As African Americans' place in American society has changed over the centuries, so, too, have the foci of African American literature. Before the American Civil War, African American literature primarily focused on the issue of slavery, as indicated by the subgenre of slave narratives. At the turn of the 20th century, books by authors such as W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington debated whether to confront or appease racist attitudes in the United States. During the American Civil Rights movement, authors such as Richard Wright and Gwendolyn Brooks wrote about issues of racial segregation and black nationalism. Today, African American literature has become accepted as an integral part of American literature, with books such as Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley, The Color Purple by Alice Walker, and Beloved by Toni Morrison achieving both best-selling and award-winning status.

Characteristics and themes:

In broad terms, African American literature can be defined as writings by people of African descent living in the United States of America. However, just as African American history and life is extremely varied, so too is African American literature. That said, African American literature has generally focused on themes of particular interest to Blacks in the United States, such as the role of African Americans within the larger American society and what it means to be an American. As Princeton University professor Albert J. Raboteau has said, all African-American studies, including African American literature, "speaks to the deeper meaning of the African-American presence in this nation. This presence has always been a test case of the nation's claims to freedom, democracy, equality, the inclusiveness of all." As such, it can be said that African American Literature explores the very issues of freedom and equality which were long denied to Negros in the United States, along with further themes such as African American culture, racism, religion, slavery, a sense of home and more.

African American literature constitutes a vital branch of the literature of the African diaspora, with African American literature both being influenced by the great African diasporic heritage and in turn influencing African diasporic writings in many countries. In addition, African American literature exists within the larger realm of post-colonial literature, even though scholars draw a distinctive line between the two by stating that "African American literature differs from most post-colonial literature in that it is written by members of a minority community who reside within a nation of vast wealth and economic power."

African American oral culture is rich in poetry, including spirituals, African American gospel music, blues and rap. This oral poetry also appears in the African American tradition of Christian sermons, which make use of deliberate repetition, cadence and alliteration. African American literature--especially written poetry, but also prose--has a strong tradition of incorporating all of these forms of oral poetry.

However, while these characteristics and themes exist on many levels of African American literature, they are not the exclusive definition of the genre and don't exist within all works within the genre. In addition, there is resistance to using Western literary theory to analyze African American literature. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., one of the most important African American literary scholars, once said, "My desire has been to allow the black tradition to speak for itself about its nature and various functions, rather than to read it, or analyze it, in terms of literary theories borrowed whole from other traditions, appropriated from without."^[8]

4. History: Early African American literature

Just as African American history predates the emergence of the United States as an independent country, so too does African American literature have similarly deep roots.

Lucy Terry is the author of the oldest piece of African American literature known which was "Bars Fight", 1746. This poem was not published until 1855 in Josiah Holland's "History of Western Massachusetts". Also, Briton Hammon's "The Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings and Surprising Deliverence of Briton Hammon, A Negro Man", 1760. Poet Phillis Wheatley (1753-84), who published her book Poems on Various Subjects in 1773, three years before American independence. Born in Senegal, Africa, Wheatley was captured and sold into slavery at the age of seven. Brought to America, she was owned by a Boston merchant. Even though she initially spoke no English, by the time she was sixteen she had mastered the language. Her poetry was praised by many of the leading figures of the American Revolution, including George Washington, who personally thanked her for a poem she wrote in his honor. Despite this, many white people found it hard to believe that a Black woman could be so intelligent as to write poetry. As a result, Wheatley had to defend herself in court by proving she actually wrote her own poetry. Some critics cite Wheatley's successful defense as the first recognition of African American literature.

Another early African American author was Jupiter Hammon (1711-1806?). Hammon, considered the first published Black writer in America, published his poem "An Evening Thought: Salvation by Christ with Penitential Cries" as a broadside in early 1761. In 1778 he wrote an ode to Phillis Wheatley, in which he discussed their shared humanity and common bonds. In 1786, Hammon gave his well-known Address to the Negroes of the State of New York. Hammon wrote the speech at age seventy-six after a lifetime of slavery and it contains his famous quote, "If we should ever get to Heaven, we shall find nobody to reproach us for being black, or for being slaves." Hammon's speech also promoted the idea of a gradual emancipation as a way of ending slavery.^[10] It is thought that Hammon stated this plan because he knew that slavery was so entrenched in American society that an immediate emancipation of all slaves would be difficult to achieve. Hammon apparently remained a slave until his death. His speech was later reprinted by several groups opposed to slavery.

William Wells Brown (1814-84) and Victor Sйjour (1817-74) produced the earliest works of fiction by African American writers. Sйjour was born free in New Orleans and moved to France at the age of 19. There he published his short story "Le Mulвtre" ("The Mulatto") in 1837; the story represents the first known fiction by an African American, but written in French and published in a French journal, it had apparently no influence on later American literature. Sйjour never returned to African American themes in his subsequent works. Brown, on the other hand, was a prominent abolitionist, lecturer, novelist, playwright, and historian. Born into slavery in the Southern United States, Brown escaped to the North, where he worked for abolitionist causes and was a prolific writer. Brown wrote what is considered to be the first novel by an African American, Clotel; or, The President's Daughter (1853). The novel is based on what was at that time considered to be a rumor about Thomas Jefferson fathering a daughter with his slave, Sally Hemings.

However, because the novel was published in England, the book is not considered the first African American novel published in the United States. This honor instead goes to Harriet Wilson, whose novel Our Nig (1859) details the difficult lives of Northern free Blacks.

Slave narratives: A subgenre of African American literature which began in the middle of the 19th century is the slave narrative. At the time, the controversy over slavery led to impassioned literature on both sides of the issue, with books like Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) representing the abolitionist view of the evils of slavery, while the so-called Anti-Tom literature by white, southern writers like William Gilmore Simms represented the pro-slavery viewpoint.

To present the true reality of slavery, a number of former slaves such as Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass wrote slave narratives, which soon became a mainstay of African American literature. Some six thousand former slaves from North America and the Caribbean wrote accounts of their lives, with about 150 of these published as separate books or pamphlets.

Slave narratives can be broadly categorized into three distinct forms: tales of religious redemption, tales to inspire the abolitionist struggle, and tales of progress. The tales written to inspire the abolitionist struggle are the most famous because they tend to have a strong autobiographical motif. Many of them are now recognized as the most literary of all 19th-century writings by African Americans, with two of the best-known being Frederick Douglass's autobiography and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs (1861).

Frederick Douglass. While Frederick Douglass (c. 1818-95) first came to public attention as an orator and as the author of his autobiographical slave narrative, he eventually became the most prominent African American of his time and one of the most influential lecturers and authors in American history.

Born into slavery in Maryland, Douglass eventually escaped and worked for numerous abolitionist causes. He also edited a number of newspapers. Douglass' best-known work is his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, which was published in 1845. At the time some critics attacked the book, not believing that a black man could have written such an eloquent work. Despite this, the book was an immediate bestseller. Douglas later revised and expanded his autobiography, which was republished as My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). In addition to serving in a number of political posts during his life, he also wrote numerous influential articles and essays.

5. Post-slavery era

After the end of slavery and the American Civil War, a number of African American authors continued to write nonfiction works about the condition of African Americans in the country.

Among the most prominent of these writers is W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963), one of the original founders of the NAACP. At the turn of the century, Du Bois published a highly influential collection of essays titled The Souls of Black Folk. The book's essays on race were groundbreaking and drew from DuBois's personal experiences to describe how African Americans lived in American society. The book contains Du Bois's famous quote: "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line." Du Bois believed that African Americans should, because of their common interests, work together to battle prejudice and inequity.

Another prominent author of this time period is Booker T. Washington (1856-1915), who in many ways represented opposite views from Du Bois. Washington was an educator and the founder of the Tuskegee Institute, a Black college in Alabama. Among his published works are Up From Slavery (1901), The Future of the American Negro (1899), Tuskegee and Its People (1905), and My Larger Education (1911). In contrast to Du Bois, who adopted a more confrontational attitude toward ending racial strife in America, Washington believed that Blacks should first lift themselves up and prove themselves the equal of whites before asking for an end to racism. While this viewpoint was popular among some Blacks (and many whites) at the time, Washington's political views would later fall out of fashion.

A third writer who gained attention during this period in the US, though not a US citizen, was the Jamaican Marcus Garvey (1887-1940), a newspaper publisher, journalist, and crusader for Pan Africanism through his organization the UNIA. He encouraged people of African ancestry to look favorably upon their ancestral homeland. He wrote a number of essays published as editorials in the UNIA house organ the Negro World newspaper. Some of his lecture material and other writings were compiled and published as nonfiction books by his second wife Amy Jacques Garvey as the Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey Or, Africa for the Africans (1924) and More Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey (1977).

Paul Laurence Dunbar, who often wrote in the rural, black dialect of the day, was the first African American poet to gain national prominence. His first book of poetry, Oak and Ivy, was published in 1893. Much of Dunbar's work, such as When Malindy Sings (1906), which includes photographs taken by the Hampton Institute Camera Club, and Joggin' Erlong (1906) provide revealing glimpses into the lives of rural African-Americans of the day. Though Dunbar died young, he was a prolific poet, essayist, novelist (among them The Uncalled, 1898 and The Fanatics, 1901) and short story writer.

Even though Du Bois, Washington, and Garvey were the leading African American intellectuals and authors of their time, other African American writers also rose to prominence. Among these is Charles W. Chesnutt, a well-known short story writer and essayist.

6. Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance from 1920 to 1940 brought new attention to African American literature. While the Harlem Renaissance, based in the African American community in Harlem in New York City, existed as a larger flowering of social thought and culture--with numerous Black artists, musicians, and others producing classic works in fields from jazz to theater--the renaissance is perhaps best known for the literature that came out of it.

Among the most famous writers of the renaissance is poet Langston Hughes. Hughes first received attention in the 1922 poetry collection, The Book of American Negro Poetry. This book, edited by James Weldon Johnson, featured the work of the period's most talented poets (including, among others, Claude McKay, who also published three novels, Home to Harlem, Banjo and Banana Bottom and a collection of short stories). In 1926, Hughes published a collection of poetry, The Weary Blues, and in 1930 a novel, Not Without Laughter. Perhaps, Hughes' most famous poem is "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," which he wrote as a young teen. His single, most recognized character is Jesse B. Simple, a plainspoken, pragmatic Harlemite whose comedic observations appeared in Hughes's columns for the Chicago Defender and the New York Post. Simple Speaks His Mind (1950) is, perhaps, the best-known collection of Simple stories published in book form. Until his death in 1967, Hughes published nine volumes of poetry, eight books of short stories, two novels, and a number of plays, children's books, and translations.