American Modernism Basic ideas: By definition - the major artistic movement responding to the sense of social breakdown in the early 20th century. (Yeats, Joyce, Proust, Mann) Roughly - from the end of the 19th century to II World War. The con...
American Post-war literature - overview In the 1940s America entered an era of post-war, post-atomic and postmodern culture. The end of history, philosophy, ideology. “No poetry after Auschwitz”. The genocide and the atomic bomb. The Age of Anxiety (the Cold War). Materialism, military expansi...
Early American Literature Jamestown (Virginia) 1607-the first settlement John Smith (1580-1631) “A Description of New England” (1616), “The General History of Virginia” (1624) Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay Colony Puritan New England Predestination (Calvin's idea) - everybody has been already a...
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) Major works: “Tamerlane and Other Poems” (1827) “Poems by Edgar A. Poe” (1831) “Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque” (1840) Literary theory: “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846) “The Poetic Principle” (1...
Ethnic American Writers “Ethnic writers” - men and women of letters, who are associated with specific ethnic groups. Ethnic American literature - still being used with reference to writers either labeled as ethnic in the past decades (which placed them in a marginal position, in opposition to the ...
Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) “This Side of Paradise” “The Chronicles of the Jazz Age” (1920) “The Great Gatsby” (1926): Narrated by Nick Carraway - a Midwesterner The society of the 1920s - living by double standards Shallow materialism The
Henry James (1843-1916) James I, James II and the Old Pretender: James I - is the traditional 19th century novelist using simple and direct style. James II - (1890-1897) short stories and plays. The Old Pretender - the magician whose style becomes more complex, experimenting with narrative techn...
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) Romances and tales “The Scarlet Letter” (1850) “The House of the Seven Gables” (1851) “The Blithedale Romance...
Preromantic fiction and American Romanticism - major writers Charles Brockden Brown “Wieland” (1798) Developed interest in strange mental states and inner disorders The innocent American paradise is laden with dark secrets. Washington Irving (...
Realism - characteristics: Focusing on average, on the closest at hand, the contemporary real people, the most familiar. Meant interpretation of actualities of any aspect of life, free from subjective prejudice, idealism, romantic odor. Presenting man in his usual, not romantic context, average m...
