All you need to know about American literature

The American literature was matured between 1870 and 1920 in both its action and its interpretation. Throughout these years American writing characterized itself in terms of style and theme from the European heritage to which it had after over a century been disproportionately compared. In the decades after the Civil War American writers have also earned more and more recognition as grave performers, as literature reviewers within and without the university started to recognize American poetry and proofs fundamentally.

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Early cultural context 

The social distress of the Civil War has created a changed sense of public knowledge among and beyond Americans continuously. The war between states was just one of many developments of the late 19th century, turning the United States of a society that was mostly fragmented into a single country, which found its ethnic diversity to be crucial although secondary.

Technological progress since the Civil War has also contributed significantly to the growth of this modern, more cohesive cultural understanding, especially in the area of American communication and connectivity. In the United States, for example, throughout 1860, there were less than thirty thousand miles of railway, and large parts of the country were primarily disconnected. 

While advancements to transport and communication by the late nineteenth century contributed to a larger, more unified view of American culture, that progress also had an impact on the nation's consciousness simultaneously and somewhat paradoxically. The rediscovery of the ethnic identity within the framework of a changing national identity would have profound consequences for the government in the decades that followed the civil war of a Native American presence in literature.

Ideals of literary realism

Throughout 1870 a new breed of American writers dedicated to the ideals of literary realism had started to appear. Although the practical visual dream was articulated in various ways by hundreds of authors in the late 19th century, in theory, it was, at least, fairly straightforward: portraying individuals, places and events as they are in the day-to-day lives. Realism as an esthetic concept was primarily a response to the idealistic movements in literary romanticism that in the United States had controlled the literary discourse of the early 1800s. Mark Twain, William Dean Howells and Henry James were the significant writers of the post-Civil War era, and they all claim that they are right to experience. Throughout their fiction, they especially stress that "simple characters" are created that are aimed at complicated ethical issues.

While in the final decades of the 19th Century, Twain, Howells, and James, along with other American authors, created novels of the best quality. None of those plays could have fully surpassed the stature of the great American story, as only one of them reflects the fullness of American cultural history. However, Howells himself was famous for saying that it was difficult for every novel to embody America's experience entirely because of its geographical complexity. Realistic American authors concentrated in general on the nature of the world they thought was right and reported unique modalities, vernacular modes of expression and the distinctive customs of their citizens. Naturally, the way people talk and conduct themselves tends to be sectional. And thus the particular brand of realistic American fiction, created in the late 19th century, became recognized as regionalism.

American literature at the end of the century 

The significant and groundbreaking transformation of American literature started in the 1890s. A distinguishing feature of American historical realism after the Civil War was stories featuring protagonists in complicated ethical dilemmas. Therefore, it was a fallacious assumption that perhaps man has the free will to distinguish between that which is correct and that which is false, right and wrong, light and dark. By the end of the century, Americans were starting to question the broader concept of human rights. They adopted elements of biological determinism, a belief theory that refused to accept a free will as a reason to respond for everyday human conduct, as inspired by the increasing trend in European literature named literary naturopathic.

The Americans of the 19th century did not entirely ignore concepts of "determinism." Naturally, many Christian theology interpretations have preached for centenaries teachings which, if not all levels of life, denied human agency at most. However in the early to mid-1800s other scientific advances began arguing for more theological determinism. In 1859, Charles Darwin presented a ground-breaking analysis of his research On the Origin of Species, which, especially in the latter decades of the 19th century, could almost be misunderstood in its influence on Western thought. His ideas of "natural selection," by intimating that humans could be directly connected to lesser species of organisms, effectively destroyed an ennoble view of human life. Besides the daunting centuries of simple religious thinking, Darwin's theories indicate that human behaviour is primarily regulated by biologically based powers beyond the influence of the person. The hypothesis of Darwinian evolution soon became the foundation of a variety of controversial scientific assumptions regarding human behaviour. , who coined the phrase "the most fitting life" during the 1870s to support the social and economic disparities of the Gilded Age.

The new generation of writers

Darwin, Spencer, as well as other nineteenth-century radical science theorists, have inspired an American new generation to view life as a war that seems to have ruined human beings. Stephen Crane, Kate Chopin, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Edith Wharton and Jack London, all created a fiction about the end of the century emphasizing the decisive forces of political, biological and ecological control. Crane's "Maggie, A Girl of the Street", is widely regarded as a first substantial American naturist novel, showing many of the individual characteristics of the movement. The story has Hostile environments, marginalized lower-class characters, hopelessness illustrations, war-and savagery-drawn metaphors, as well as profoundly heartbreaking subjects. The following activity of American naturalists would also display the dullness of urban slums, arctic wilderness and weak rural areas. They depict young women pushed to sex, young men to violence and whole families to total annihilation, examining the complex of immense outside and internal forces which forced the protagonists to appear. In the end, though, literary naturalism's urgent sound was not expected. Thus, these authors see themselves as helping society as a whole to enhance.