American Literature in the 19th CenturyAmerican Literature in the 19th CenturyMuch has been said about America being the “Land of Opportunity” throughout history. From Columbus, to Walt Whitman, to present times, American society and its values differed quite a bit from American society and its values today. As these values have changed, so have the opportunities that present themselves within society, such as the ability to write about certain issues or topics. This means that the topics of literature have changed drastically along with the times as well. Much of the time, these issues and topics covered in pieces of American Literature are controversial: slavery, racism, ethnocentrism, women’s rights, and the qualities needed to obtain the opportunities America provides for people. That is why in order to be considered American Literature, the piece must characterize or define American values, morals, ideals, or standards in some way, whether it is to represent them or to oppose them.
American values are inextricably tied to these ideas, but this must evolve as time moves forward. American literature has always been diverse. In our country, the majority of writers have been Americans in the 19th century, but there have occasionally been others in the past who also were Americans. To appreciate why, and the ways in which we tend to think about our past generations and the ways in which we will come to appreciate today, we have to look at some history in the 19th century. On this page we will discuss the history of American literature. This history of American literature starts with James Joyce. Before going into particular points about his work, I would like to outline certain ways in which literature developed before and after Joyce’s times, in part because it is such a popular subject in most people’s minds, and because I like the word “literary.” While the ideas that Joyce developed were certainly not all that revolutionary, they were very popular, and his style was definitely considered revolutionary to that point. Unfortunately, that was not the case for many writers throughout the 19th century. What made this work particularly revolutionary was that, even though he made a series of works about American literature, he often put so much of it on display that this was largely forgotten. By the time he came to prominence as a writer in the American South in the early 20th century, American literature was largely unknown. There had been plenty of literature in English for many years — both fiction and poetry for example — and when Joyce wrote, he was making a major impact in the English literature world. However, this wasn’t until the early twentieth century that his work turned mainstream attention to other American literature in a way the traditional readers of the time never could have imagined, where it would be important to recognize that his views were based on what was known about those things. However, as Joyce made his way down to prominence, he was gaining more attention — much more so than any other American author — in this regard that, again, it seems that in many cases he could have gotten a reputation for being a pioneer of the American medium in a number of ways. In addition to being more popular than Joyce’s fiction, American literature enjoyed a significant growth in popularity throughout the 1900s and 1930s as literature began to become even more available to the American public. But in the early 1920s, that may very well have been part of the reason why American literature was so popular, as people began to accept it as a way to write. From the mid-1920s to the mid-2030s, American literature was being embraced and appreciated as such by more people in general, from American intellectuals to the American writers themselves. In that period, writing by any means was considered a political activity, not a scholarly activity. From early 1900 to 1936, the United States had about 20,000 people who wrote fiction on a daily or weekly basis. And in fact, this was a huge number that the national public, especially those born after 1848, didn’t know. So the public of the world didn’t know how to write, even if it went one way or the other. This changed with, first, the popularity of books of poetry in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1933, the United Kingdom experienced a massive rise in the popularity of book after book in a sense, as it was able to pick up an increasing number of highly sought after and well established young writers, primarily young black men of colour. Additionally, the popularity of poetry in many of the world’s major countries began to be felt in the United States, as well, in part due to the popularity of the novel as a way to write in a way that American literary fiction failed to do. The success of American fiction led to a massive, exponential growth in the number of people writing fiction, especially in the 20th century
You may choose to use the following pages to:
You may choose to use the following pages to:
You may choose to use the following pages to: