The Literature of North America

I. American Literature
The American Literature is a body of literary works in the English language
beginning in the original 13 English colonies and continuing in the present-
day United States. From its origins in colonial America to its present status
internationally, American literature has stressed the diversity and uniqueness
of the American character and experience (Academic American
Encyclopedia, 1985) as it follows closely the history of the vast nation.
A. Colonial Period Literature
The earliest writings were by adventurers and colonists who based
their works on European models. All writings were devoted to spiritual
concerns, practical matters of politics, and promotion of settlements. Little
poetry on religious and pious themes was written by the early poets like
Michael Wrigglesworth, Anne Bradstreet, and Edward Taylor. A few
interesting personal journals and diaries written by Capt. John Smith, John
Winthrop and William Bradford survived. Coton Mather, Jonathan
Edwards, and John Woolman were the important writers of the period.
B. Revolutionary Period Literature
Writing during this time concentrated on politics and on political
philosophy. Men turned their attention from religion to government. One of
these men was Benjamin Franklin who encouraged writers by being a
publisher and founder of newspapers. Political writing reached new
heights as Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton,
George Washington, and John Madison examined the nature of society.
These were the years when the colonies broke away from England and
declared themselves as a new and independent nation.
C. The New Nation Literature
Immediately following independence, writers made efforts to
develop a native literature which content – character and setting – was
distinctly identifiable as American. This is the period of beginning for
poetry, fiction, and drama in America. Writing reflected patriotic fervor and
moral earnestness.
Washington Irving’s Sketch Book (1819-20) and James Fennimore
Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales (1823-41) gained fame both in U.S. and
Europe. William Cullen Bryant and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow who
wrote Psalm of Life were the leading poets.
In the 1830s, attention was given to the problem of slavery and so
reform characterized American literature at this time. Harriet Beecher
Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the most influential antislavery
work.
D. Mid-19th Century Literature
The middle of the 19th century saw the beginning of a truly
independent American literature which is said to have come of age. This
period, especially the years 1850-55, has been called the American
 Renaissance or the Flowering of American Literature. More masterpieces
were written at this time than in any other equal span of years in American
history (Compton’s Encyclopedia, 1990). Writers, specifically
transcendentalists, espoused a high moral seriousness and a sense that
the individual was superior to tradition and social customs. Ralph Waldo
Emerson (1803-82) who wrote the essay Friendship was the most
prominent writer. His essays and those of Henry David Thoreau vied with
the eerie, haunting poetry and short stories of Edgar Allan Poe, author of
Cask of Amontillado. Other notable writers were Walt Whitman, Emily
Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville.
E. The Second Half of 19th Century Literature
The Civil War sharply interrupted American literary activity. But as
the nation revived, many writers found subjects for fiction and poetry in
their surroundings. These were the first regional or local color writers.
Mark Twain who wrote two American classics, The Adventures of Tom
Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) was the
greatest regionalist writer.
By the end of the century, realism, a literary and intellectual
movement that is unlike romanticism, made writers write about life as it is
actually lived and not as it is imagined it could be. A group of journalists
and writers known as “muckrakers” protested against what they
considered evils of the age – corruption, fraud, growing industrialism, and
the like. Stephen Crane and Henry James were two of the more notable
realists.
F. The Modern Period Literature
After World War I, poetry has enjoyed a rebirth and drama has
come of age artistically. It is prose fiction, however, that is the major form
of literary expression in the 20th century.
Literature reflected the various reactions to the new circumstances.
Some writers like Ernest Hemingway, author of Cat in the Rain, as well as
F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Dos Passos became expatriates in Europe
because of disillusionment with the war. Other writers viewed the same
realities with hope for the future. The writing that seemed most likely to
survive emphasized enduring human values and the unquenchable vitality
of the human spirit.
Modernism as a major literary movement developed. Writers
suggested rather than asserted meaning in their writing. Themes were
implied rather than stated so readers had to draw their own conclusions.
Symbolisms, allusions, limited point of view, and stream of consciousness
were utilized (Harkavy, 1994).
One of the most powerful among U.S. novelists was William
Faulkner who wrote A Rose for Emily. The Great Depression fostered
more socially aware writing such as The Pearl by John Steinbeck. Among
playwrights of the period, Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee
Williams, author of the Glass Menagerie, were the most notable ones.
 The Literature of Europe

European literature did not start to take shape until about 1000 A.D. Before this
period, Europe was a loose confederation of divided kingdoms and tribes that had not
yet an idea that they were better off as a united continent. Thus, the literature of ancient
Europe was the output of individual kingdoms or tribes, usually about heroes fighting
enemies to save thrones, places, or people. The literature during this time is classified
as ancient or classic. Belonging to this category are works such as the English Beowulf,
the Greek myths and classics such as Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey, tragedies
such as Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Antigone, Virgil of Rome’s The Aeneid, German
and Scandinavian fairy tales such as Snow White and The Little Mermaid, Spain’s El
Cid, the French Song of Roland, and the Irish Iimericks. The ancient period in Europe
also produced two of the greatest civilizations in world history, Greek and Roman.
Today, the term world literature is largely interpreted as English, which means
any literature spread by the English language either because it is written in English or
translated in English. Thanks to the cohesion that has marked European relations in the
past 1000 years or so, world literature now has a more specific way of looking at
European literature, whether originally written in English or translated into it.
The two dominant countries in ancient European literature are Greece and
Rome/Italy. The American poet and fiction writer Edgar Allan Poe had written of the
glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome.
Greek literature has given the world such terms as the Olympics, after Mt.
Olympus, the legendary home of Greek gods and goddesses such as Zeus, Hera,
Apollo, Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom from which Ateneo got its name, and
Aphrodite; myths, Arcadia, for the simple pastoral life, Homer, Helen of Troy, Achilles,
Odysseus, Cyclops, Alexander the Great, and giant names such as Socrates, Aristotle,
and Plato. Rome, on the other hand, cannot be outdone and has given the world such
terms as Venus, the Great Roman Empire, Horace, Latin, Ovid, Giovanni Boccaccio
and Decameron, Dante and The Divine Comedy, The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli,
Luigi Pirandello, Julius Caesar, Marc Anthony, the Colossus, and the Vatican, mention
of which immediately warms the hearts of at least one billion Catholics, and whose
bishops have greatly shaped and influenced world events in the last 2000 years. Latin is
now a dead language but one o the most famous sentences in the world literature is
Habemus papam (We have a pope).
Germany caused the two horrific wars in the recent memory and gives many
world literature readers a big headache every time they read of Hitler, Nazism, and the
Holocaust, but in the 18th century it joined the ranks of the greatest in world literature
with authors and artists such as Johann Wolfgang von Geothe (Dr. Faust or Faustus),
Friedrich von Schiller, Bertolt Brecht, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Immanuel Kant,
Richard Wagner, Mozart, Hegel, Schopenhuer, Thomas Mann, and Martin Luther (The
Reformation). Germany also gave the world Albert Einstein although Einstein died an
American citizen.
 France gave birth to existentialism in world literature with Jean Paul Sartre at the
helm, and instituted the genre of the essay when Michel de Montaigne invented it.
Writers such as Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus), Francois Rabelais, Jean-
Jacques Rousseau, Moliere, Voltaire, Guy de Maupassant, Alexander Dumas (The
Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers), and Victor Hugo (Les Miserables) are
only among the few famous French authors and works. France is also the champion
Nobel Prize winner in literature in Europe – 11 out of 67 European Nobel Prize winners
for literature.
England’s obscure tribe in ancient times, the Angles, gave the world more than
the English language – it gave the world a literary nexus. And with the English language
comes a roster of writers and works now so indelible a part of world literature: Alfred the
Great, Geoffrey Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales, The Legend of King Arthur and the
Knights of the Round Table, William Shakespeare, considered the crowning glory of the
English Renaissance, John Milton, Francis Bacon, Emily Bronte (Wuthering Heights),
Charlotte Bronte (Jane Eyre), Charles Dickens, Ben Johnson, Romantic literature,
George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Lord Byron, Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
Matthew Arnold, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Robert
Burns, D.H. Lawrence, and Rudyard Kipling, to mention only a few.
Russia is partly Asian but beyond the Ural Mountains it is a huge chunk of
Europe. Although its literature as the world now knows is comparatively young, its
contributions to world literature are among the world’s greatest, contributions such as
the poems of Alexander Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy’s works (Anna Karenina, War and Peace,
God Sees the Truth But Waits), Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novels (Crime and Punishment,
The Brothers Karamazov), Anton Chekhov’s short stories (The Orchard, The Cherry
Tree), Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago,
again, to mention only a few.
Norway’s Henrik Ibsen is considered the second Shakespeare of the theatre and
his A Doll House has been translated into tens and tens of languages and Sweden gave
the world Alfred Nobel who instituted the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Lastly, Europe has now presently found an identity as a unified continent.

ENGLISH LITERATURE

ELEGY WRITTEN IN
A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD
By Thomas Gray (1716-71)
 [This poem which is considered one of the best known and widely read
elegies in the English language, example poetry during the Transition Period in
English literature. It is one of the forerunners of romanticism in that it shuns the
excessive artificiality of the Age of Classicism. It is romantic in that it gives
expression to the concerns of ordinary people in the countryside.
An elegy is a lyric poem that expresses a feeling, voices a mood about the
meaning of life and death. It is lyric poetry devoted to a philosophical meditation
of the quintessence of death.
The source of Gray’s inspiration for the elegy was the churchyard of Stoke
Poges, a farming village near London. In the poem, Gray contemplates on the
effects of nature on one’s moods and on the life of common people, their simple
joys and their destined lot.]

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,

And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds:

Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower

The moping owl does to the moon complain
Of such as, wandering near her secret bower,
Molest her ancient solitary reign.

Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade,

Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap,
Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
The rude Forefathers of the hamlet sleep.

The breezy call of incense-breathing morn,

The swallow twittering from the straw-built shed,
The cock's shrill clarion, or the echoing horn,
No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.

For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,

Or busy housewife ply her evening care:
No children run to lisp their sire's return,
Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share,
 Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,
Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke;
How jocund did they drive their team afield!
How bow'd the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,

Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the Poor.

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,

And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Awaits alike th' inevitable hour:-
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Nor you, ye Proud, impute to these the fault

If Memory o'er their tomb no trophies raise,
Where through the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault
The pealing anthem swells the note of praise.

Can storied urn or animated bust

Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?
Can Honour's voice provoke the silent dust,
Or Flattery soothe the dull cold ear of Death?

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid

Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway'd,
Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre:

But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page,

Rich with the spoils of time, did ne'er unroll;
Chill Penury repress'd their noble rage,
And froze the genial current of the soul.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene

The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast

The little tyrant of his fields withstood,
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell, guiltless of his country's blood.

Th' applause of list'ning senates to command,

 The threats of pain and ruin to despise,
To scatter plenty o'er a smiling land,
And read their history in a nation's eyes,

Their lot forbad: nor circumscribed alone

Their growing virtues, but their crimes confined;
Forbad to wade through slaughter to a throne,
And shut the gates of mercy on mankind,

The struggling pangs of conscious truth to hide,

To quench the blushes of ingenuous shame,
Or heap the shrine of Luxury and Pride
With incense kindled at the Muse's flame.

Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife,

Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray;
Along the cool sequester'd vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenour of their way.

Yet e'en these bones from insult to protect

Some frail memorial still erected nigh,
With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture deck'd,
Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.

Their name, their years, spelt by th' unletter'd Muse,

The place of fame and elegy supply:
And many a holy text around she strews,
That teach the rustic moralist to die.

For who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey,

This pleasing anxious being e'er resign'd,
Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,
Nor cast one longing lingering look behind?

On some fond breast the parting soul relies,

Some pious drops the closing eye requires;
E'en from the tomb the voice of Nature cries,
E'en in our ashes live their wonted fires.

For thee, who, mindful of th' unhonour'd dead,

Dost in these lines their artless tale relate;
If chance, by lonely contemplation led,
Some kindred spirit shall inquire thy fate, --

Haply some hoary-headed swain may say,

"Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn
 Brushing with hasty steps the dews away,
To meet the sun upon the upland lawn;

"There at the foot of yonder nodding beech

That wreathes its old fantastic roots so high.
His listless length at noontide would he stretch,
And pore upon the brook that babbles by.

"Hard by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn,

Muttering his wayward fancies he would rove;
Now drooping, woeful wan, like one forlorn,
Or crazed with care, or cross'd in hopeless love.

"One morn I miss'd him on the custom'd hill,

Along the heath, and near his favourite tree;
Another came; nor yet beside the rill,
Nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he;

"The next with dirges due in sad array

Slow through the church-way path we saw him borne,-
Approach and read (for thou canst read) the lay
Graved on the stone beneath yon aged thorn."
The Epitaph

Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth

A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown.
Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth,
And Melacholy marked him for her own.

Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere,

Heaven did a recompense as largely send:
He gave to Misery all he had, a tear,
He gained from Heaven ('twas all he wish'd) a friend.

No farther seek his merits to disclose,

Or draw his frailties from their dread abode
(There they alike in trembling hope repose),
The bosom of his Father and his God.