American literature

American literature is the literature written or produced in the area of the United States and its preceding colonies. For more specific discussions of poetry and theater, see Poetry of the United States and Theater in the United States. During its early history, America was a series of British colonies on the eastern coast of the present-day United States. Therefore, its literary tradition begins as linked to the broader tradition of English literature. However, unique American characteristics and the breadth of its production usually now cause it to be considered a separate path and tradition.

The New England colonies were the center of early American literature. The revolutionary period contained political writings by Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine. In the post-war period, Thomas Jefferson's United States Declaration of Independence solidified his status as a key American writer. It was in the late 18th and early 19th centuries that the nation's first novels were published. With the War of 1812 and an increasing desire to produce uniquely American literature and culture, a number of key new literary figures emerged, perhaps most prominently Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe. In 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) started a movement known as Transcendentalism. Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) wrote Walden, which urges resistance to the dictates of organized society. The political conflict surrounding abolitionism inspired the writings of William Lloyd Garrison and Harriet Beecher Stowe in her world-famous Uncle Tom's Cabin. These efforts were supported by the continuation of the slave narrative autobiography, of which the best known example from this period was Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.

American Literature (academic discipline)

American Literature is an academic discipline devoted to the study of American literature.

History

In the mid-19th century, English literature within the United States was generally seen, within academia, as inferior to classical literature and its study generally limited to secondary schools. The gradual legitimization of the English language within American academia was accompanied by the introduction of a limited number of university courses devoted to the study of American literature. The first university-level course in American literature was introduced at Princeton University in 1872 by John Seely Hart. By the 1880s, several universities offered undergraduate classes in the subject, including Dartmouth College, Mount Holyoke College, the University of Notre Dame and the University of Iowa. The first graduate-level course in American literature was taught at the University of Virginia in 1891.

In 1895 Dartmouth professor Charles Francis Richardson published the two-volume work American Literature, 1607-1885, credited as the first attempt at a comprehensive history of American literature. The surge of nationalist fervor that accompanied United States involvement in World War I helped grow the study of American literature within the United States. This was followed by an increased interest in the field abroad. By 1932 an assistant professorship of American Literature had been established at a French university while a chair for the study of "American civilization" had been created at Berlin University.

American literature (disambiguation)

American literature is the literature written or produced in the area of the United States and its preceding colonies.

American literature can also refer to: