306. The major w The Faerie Queene

306.The major w The Faerie Queene
In The Faerie Queene, Spenser creates an allegory: The characters of his far-off, fanciful "Faerie Land" are meant to have a symbolic meaning in the real world. In Books I and III, the poet follows the journeys of two knights, Redcrosse and Britomart, and in doing so he examines the two virtues he considers most important to Christian life--Holiness and Chastity. Redcrosse, the knight of Holiness, is much like the Apostle Peter: In his eagerness to serve his Lord, he gets himself into unforeseen trouble that he is not yet virtuous enough to handle. His quest is to be united with Una, who signifies Truth--Holiness cannot be attained without knowledge of Christian truth. In his immature state, he mistakes falsehood for truth by following the deceitful witch Duessa. He pays for this mistake with suffering, but in the end, this suffering makes way for his recovery in the House of Holiness, aided by Faith, Hope, and Charity. With newfound strength and the grace of God, he is able to conquer the dragon that represents all the evil in the world.
In a different manner, Britomart also progresses in her virtue of chastity. She already has the strength to resist lust, but she is not ready to accept love, the love she feels when she sees a vision of her future husband in a magic mirror. She learns to incorporate chaste resistance with active love, which is what Spenser sees as true Christian love: moderation. Whereas Redcrosse made his own mistakes (to show to us the consequences of an unholy life), it is not Britomart but the other characters in Book III who show the destructive power of an unchaste life. Spenser says in his Preface to the poem that his goal is to show how a virtuous man should live. The themes of Book I and Book III come together in the idea that our native virtue must be augmented or transformed if it is to become true Christian virtue. Spenser has a high regard for the natural qualities of creatures; he shows that the satyrs, the lion, and many human characters have an inborn inclination toward the good. And yet, he consistently shows their failure when faced with the worst evils. These evils can only be defeated by the Christian good.
High on Spenser's list of evils is the Catholic Church, and this enmity lends a political overtone to the poem, since the religious conflicts of the time were inextricably tied to politics. The poet is unashamed in his promotion of his beloved monarch, Queen Elizabeth; he takes considerable historical license in connecting her line with King Arthur. Spenser took a great pride in his country and in his Protestant faith. He took aim at very real corruption within the Catholic Church; such attacks were by no means unusual in his day, but his use of them in an epic poem raised his criticism above the level of the propagandists.
As a purely poetic work, The Faerie Queene was neither original nor always remarkable; Spenser depends heavily on his Italian romantic sources (Ariosto & Tasso), as well as medieval and classical works like The Romance of the Rose and The Aeneid. It is Spenser's blending of such diverse sources with a high-minded allegory that makes the poem unique and remarkable. He is able to take images from superficial romances, courtly love stories, and tragic epics alike, and give them real importance in the context of the poem. No image is let fall from Spenser's pen that does not have grave significance, and this gives The Faerie Queene the richness that has kept it high among the ranks of the greatest poetry in the English language.

307.Renaissance period in English literature

English Renaissance
The English Renaissance was a cultural and artistic movement in England dating from the late 15th to the early 17th century. It is associated with the pan-European Renaissance that is usually regarded as beginning in Italy in the late 14th century. Like most of northern Europe, England saw little of these developments until more than a century later. The beginning of the English Renaissance is often taken, as a convenience, to be 1485, when the Battle of Bosworth Field ended the Wars of the Roses and inaugurated the Tudor Dynasty. Renaissance style and ideas, however, were slow to penetrate England, and the Elizabethan era in the second half of the 16th century is usually regarded as the height of the English Renaissance.
Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, standing in a white embroidered gown with large bustle and sleeves and small waist, with a high lace collar. She is holding a folded fan and a pair of gloves, and standing on top of a world map. Thunder clouds appear over her left shoulder, and breaking sun over her right.Queen Elizabeth I standing on a map of England
The English Renaissance is different from the Italian Renaissance in several ways. The dominant art forms of the English Renaissance were literature and music. Visual arts in the English Renaissance were much less significant than in the Italian Renaissance. The English period began far later than the Italian, which is usually considered to begin in the late 14th century, and was moving into Mannerism and the Baroque by the 1550s or earlier. In contrast, the English Renaissance can only be said to begin, shakily, in the 1520s, and continued until perhaps 1620.
Literature
England had a strong tradition of literature in the English vernacular, which gradually increased as English use of the printing press became common by the mid 16th century. By the time of Elizabethan literature a vigorous literary culture in both drama and poetry included poets such as Edmund Spenser, whose verse epic The Faerie Queene had a strong influence on English literature but was eventually overshadowed by the lyrics of William Shakespeare, Thomas Wyatt and others. Typically, the works of these playwrights and poets circulated in manuscript form for some time before they were published, and above all the plays of English Renaissance theatre were the outstanding legacy of the period.
The English theatre scene, which performed both for the court and nobility in private performances, and a very wide public in the theatres, was the most crowded in Europe, with a host of other playwrights as well as the giant figures of Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Elizabeth herself was a product of Renaissance humanism trained by Roger Ascham, and wrote occasional poems such as On Monsieur’s Departure at critical moments of her life. Philosophers and intellectuals included Thomas More and Francis Bacon. All the 16th century Tudor monarchs were highly educated, as was much of the nobility, and Italian literature had a considerable following, providing the sources for many of Shakespeare's plays. English thought advanced towards modern science with the Baconian Method, a forerunner of the Scientific Method. The language of the Book of Common Prayer, first published in 1549, and at the end of the period the Authorised Version ("King James Version" to Americans) of the Bible (1611) had enduring impacts on the English consciousness.
Criticism of the idea of the English Renaissance
Oil painting of a young man lying on the ground in a forest. His head is propped on his bent arm, and he is covered by a shield. In the background is a plumed horse in blue armor, a squire, and hunting apparatusEdward Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury, circa 1610-14
The notion of calling this period "The Renaissance" is a modern invention, having been popularized by the historian Jacob Burckhardt in the 19th century. The idea of the Renaissance has come under increased criticism by many cultural historians, and some have contended that the "English Renaissance" has no real tie with the artistic achievements and aims of the Italian artists (Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Donatello) who are closely identified with Renaissance visual art. Whereas from the perspective of literary history, England had already experienced a flourishing of literature over 200 years before the time of Shakespeare, during the last decades of the fourteenth century. Geoffrey Chaucer's popularizing of English as a medium of literary composition rather than Latin occurred only 50 years after Dante had started using Italian for serious poetry, and Chaucer translated works by both Boccaccio and Petrarch into Middle English. At the same time William Langland, author ofPiers Plowman, and John Gower were also writing in English. In the fifteenth century, Thomas Malory, author of Le Morte D'Arthur, was a notable figure. For this reason, scholars find the singularity of the period called the English Renaissance questionable; C. S. Lewis, a professor of Medieval and Renaissance literature at Oxford and Cambridge, famously remarked to a colleague that he had "discovered" that there was no English Renaissance, and that if there had been one, it had "no effect whatsoever."
Historians have also begun to consider the word "Renaissance" as an unnecessarily loaded word that implies an unambiguously positive "rebirth" from the supposedly more primitive Middle Ages. Some historians have asked the question "a renaissance for whom?," pointing out, for example, that the status of women in society arguably declined during the Renaissance. Many historians and cultural historians now prefer to use the term "early modern" for this period, a term that highlights the period as a transitional one that led to the modern world, but attempts to avoid positive or negative connotations.
Other cultural historians have countered that, regardless of whether the name "renaissance" is apt, there was undeniably an artistic flowering in England under the Tudor monarchs, culminating in Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

308.Pre-Renaissance Period in English literature

The later Middle English and early Renaissance periods
One of the most important factors in the nature and development of English literature between about 1350 and 1550 was the peculiar linguistic situation in England at the beginning of the period. Among the small minority of the population that could be regarded as literate, bilingualism and even trilingualism were common. Insofar as it was considered a serious literary medium at all, English was obliged to compete on uneven terms with Latin and with the Anglo-Norman dialect of French widely used in England at the time. Moreover, extreme dialectal diversity within English itself made it difficult for vernacular writings, irrespective of their literary pretensions, to circulate very far outside their immediate areas of composition, a disadvantage not suffered by writings in Anglo-Norman and Latin. Literary culture managed to survive and in fact to flourish in the face of such potentially crushing factors as the catastrophic mortality of the Black Death (1347–51), chronic external and internal military conflicts in the form of the Hundred Years’ War and the Wars of the Roses, and serious social, political, and religious unrest, as evinced in the Peasants’ Revolt (1381) and the rise of Lollardism (centred on the religious teachings of John Wycliffe). All the more remarkable, then, was the literary and linguistic revolution that took place in England between about 1350 and 1400 and that was slowly and soberly consolidated over the subsequent 150 years.
Later Middle English poetry
The revival of alliterative poetry
The most puzzling episode in the development of later Middle English literature is the apparently sudden reappearance of unrhymed alliterative poetry in the mid-14th century. Debate continues as to whether the group of long, serious, and sometimes learned poems written between about 1350 and the first decade of the 15th century should be regarded as an “alliterative revival” or rather as the late flowering of a largely lost native tradition stretching back to the Old English period. The earliest examples of the phenomenon, William of Palerne and Winner and Waster, are both datable to the 1350s, but neither poem exhibits to the full all the characteristics of the slightly later poems central to the movement. William of Palerne, condescendingly commissioned by a nobleman for the benefit of “them that know no French,” is a homely paraphrase of a courtly Continental romance, the only poem in the group to take love as its central theme. The poet’s technical competence in handling the difficult syntax and diction of the alliterative style is not, however, to be compared with that of Winner and Waster’s author, who exhibits full mastery of the form, particularly in descriptions of setting and spectacle. This poem’s topical concern with social satire links it primarily with another, less formal body of alliterative verse, of which William Langland’s Piers Plowman was the principal representative and exemplar. Indeed, Winner and Waster, with its sense of social commitment and occasional apocalyptic gesture, may well have served as a source of inspiration for Langland himself.

The term alliterative revival should not be taken to imply a return to the principles of classical Old English versification. The authors of the later 14th-century alliterative poems either inherited or developed their own conventions, which resemble those of the Old English tradition in only the most general way. The syntax and particularly the diction of later Middle English alliterative verse were also distinctive, and the search for alliterating phrases and constructions led to the extensive use of archaic, technical, and dialectal words. Hunts, feasts, battles, storms, and landscapes were described with a brilliant concretion of detail rarely paralleled since, while the abler poets also contrived subtle modulations of the staple verse-paragraph to accommodate dialogue, discourse, and argument. Among the poems central to the movement were three pieces dealing with the life and legends of Alexander the Great, the massive Destruction of Troy, and the Siege of Jerusalem. The fact that all of these derived from various Latin sources suggests that the anonymous poets were likely to have been clerics with a strong, if bookish, historical sense of their romance “matters.” The “matter of Britain” was represented by an outstanding composition, the alliterative Morte Arthure, an epic portrayal of King Arthur’s conquests in Europe and his eventual fall, which combined a strong narrative thrust with considerable density and subtlety of diction. A gathering sense of inevitable transitoriness gradually tempers the virile realization of heroic idealism, and it is not surprising to find that the poem was later used by Sir Thomas Malory as a source for his prose account of the Arthurian legend, Le Morte Darthur (completed c. 1470).

309.Allegorical poem of William Langland "Piers Plowman"
Based on the language used in The Vision of Piers Plowman, it is presumed to be set in late fourteenth-century England. The poem depicts a time in history associated with major upheaval as corruption existed both among statesmen and within the church. During the 14th century, England experienced the Great Famine and the Bubonic Plague, which were two catastrophic events that killed nearly half of England’s population. In opposition to an implemented poll tax, the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 exposed many flaws of the English economy. The aftermath of these events resulted in economic decline and upheaval of old political order. Langland’s poem highlights the challenges of society, theology and economy in medieval England (Warner).
SUMMARY
The Vision of Piers Plowman begins in the Malvern Hills with the main character, Will, laying down to rest and having two remarkable dreams. In the first dream, there is an ethereal woman in a grand tower to the east and an opposingly dark dungeon to the west, with a field of society’s people in-between. The “field of folk,” as the author calls society, is shown in three different classes: clergy, nobility, and peasantry, with the corrupt clergy selling papal pardons to the people. The woman casts light on Christianity and a straight pathway for entrance into Heaven, alluding to the many flawed and varying ways people attempt to gain salvation.
In Will’s next dream, Piers Plowman, an honest, hard-working farmer who epitomizes Christ, is introduced. The dream begins with a preacher telling his people that the purpose of life is to seek out Saint Truth. Piers Plowman agrees with the pastor, leading the people on a journey to Saint Truth, eventually concluding that one’s life and afterlife are composed of the actions and daily choices individuals make. The story comes to an end as Will wakes up from his dream about Piers Plowman and sets out on his own personal journey to find Truth in his life. The last section from the C-version of the text provides insight about the author’s empathy for the peasantry, while emphasizing his belief in the feudal system and the benefits of social hierarchy. Will, the dreamer, ultimately realizes that Christian morals and lessons provide guidance and answers to the fundamental questions that plague mankind. The poem intersperses biblical verses and uses character names to take the reader on a journey through the Ten Commandments of the Bible as well as portray the importance of love for God and one another.
THEMES
The story itself is divided into two dreams that Will experiences and the C-text at the end. The dreams/visions are complex in nature, but reveal poignant themes. In the first dream, the author describes the “fair field full of folk” in-between the tower to the east and the dungeon to the west that represent Heaven and Hell, revealing that one’s daily choices have positive and negative consequences in life and after death. The author reveals that “Parish priest and pardoner share all the silver” through the selling of papal pardons for financial gain, revealing that the church should guide the people towards holiness, but are instead leading them down the opposite path. Similarly, the journey to seek Saint Truth throughout the entirety of the second dream reveals that Christianity teaches and guides mankind to seek spiritual rewards rather than physical ones. The author upholds societal norms such as the feudal system, while revealing societal flaws such as church corruption. By taking the reader on an allegorical journey that tackles universal moral and personal dilemmas, The Vision of Piers Plowman digs deeper into what it means to love God and mankind, and ultimately how to live a Christian life.

310.Ralph Waldo Emerson. ―On Nature. Plot analyzing.

Analysis of Emerson’s “Nature”
In his essay “Nature,” Ralph Waldo Emerson exhibits an untraditional appreciation for the world around him. Concerned initially with the stars and the world around us, the grandeur of nature, Emerson then turns his attention onto how we perceive objects. “Nature” seeks to show humanity a new form of enlightening the human spirit and urges the formation of a strong link between man and the Universal Spirit. Emerson sees nature as an inspiration for people to grasp a deeper understanding of the spiritual world.Emerson begins his essay by observing the omnipresence of nature, which garners respect from the observer. However, nature always seems distant, indifferent. Emerson then puts forth the idea that not everyone can observe nature, that one must have the capacity to appreciate, to feel awe and wonder, like a child would who does not try to understand but only appreciate. He personifies nature as a woman by giving it human emotions and actions, such as “Nature never wears a mean appearance”, and also that the “wisest man could never loser curiosity by finding out all her perfection.” The experience with nature that Emerson describes is truly sublime, magical and yet indescribably beautiful.Using stars as symbols of the universe, Emerson states that we take stars for granted because they are always present in our lives, no matter where we live. He then moves on from commenting on the faraway stars and begins to discuss the immediate landscape around him. He creates a bond between the stars and the landscape, furthering the theme of a chain linking everything in the universe. Emerson then makes a claim that the person who is most likely to see the whole of nature is the poet, distinguishing the poet from other people. He says that poets can see nature plainly, not superficially as many people do. Instead of using theories of the past that Emerson says need to be discarded, the person who yearns to see must reveal their inner child, accepting nature as it is rather than attempting to manipulate it into something it is not.Emerson’s referral to the Universal Being, which he identifies with God, is what is now identified as transcendentalism. Every object in nature requires an animating life force, through which, Emerson believes that they are linked. Emerson claims that he is nothing, but he sees all. He concludes his chapter on nature by stating that Nature does not have a personality that it alone devises. Humans, he says, give nature the human characteristics we perceive it to have.In the following sections, Emerson relates the idea of nature as an instructor to man and how man can and should learn from nature. Nature is a divine creation of God and through it men can learn to be closer to Him. He refers to nature’s beauty as the qualities of nature that have medicinal and restorative powers for humans. The special beauty of nature has a strong ability to relieve the stress and anxiety that many humans suffer from. Emerson points out that a person who passively loses himself in the landscape will be rewarded by nature’s regenerative powers, whereas a person who consciously seeks out such healing will be tricked by nature’s illusions. In Emerson’s section on the relationship between nature and language, he draws the comparison between words and the objects they represent in nature, and that these objects signify spiritual realities, and nature symbolizes spirituality. He illustrates nature as the interpreter between people, supplying the language that people use to communicate with. For example, he says that all people recognize that light and dark figuratively express knowledge and ignorance. The theme of universal understanding is emphasized further when he claims that each individual shares a universal soul linking that person to all others. Emerson claims that the relationship between the mind and matter is not fancied by some poets, but stands in the will of God, and so is free to be known by all men. The world will become an “open book” from which all can read.Emerson then goes on to tackle the difficult question of subjective truth and the impossibility of verifying the truth of external reality. The average person doesn’t want to know what he thinks is real might be an illusion. However, whether or not nature exists as something distinct remains definitively unanswerable.After analyzing “Nature,” one can see that Ralph Waldo Emerson has a distinct, undeniable love for nature and the sublime. He believes that all enlightenment of the human nature, that all knowledge, that the relationship between God and humans, transcends through nature. Also, all ills and evils in the world may be traceable to this lapsing away from close attention to spiritual truths that comes from nature. Emerson theorizes that each person is a microcosm, a small universe corresponding to the macrocosm of the natural world. His greatest complaint is that we gain a limited knowledge of nature because we too readily mistake understanding for reason. Nature is the inspiration through which humanity begins to understand, not reason with, the natural world.

311. American Poetry in the early 20th century.

1900 - 1945
At the beginning of the 20th century, American novelists were expanding fiction's social spectrum to encompass both high and low life. In her stories and novels, Edith Wharton (1862-1937) scrutinized the upper-class, Eastern-seaboard society in which she had grown up. One of her finest books, The Age of Innocence, centers on a man who chooses to marry a conventional, socially acceptable woman rather than a fascinating outsider. At about the same time, Stephen Crane (1871-1900) depicted the life of New York City prostitutes in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. And in Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) portrayed a country girl who moves to Chicago and becomes a kept woman.
Experimentation in style and form soon joined the new freedom in subject matter. In 1909, Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), by then an expatriate in Paris, published Three Lives, an innovative work of fiction influenced by her familiarity with cubism, jazz, and other movements in contemporary art and music.
The poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972) was born in Idaho but spent much of his adult life in Europe. His work is complex, sometimes obscure, with multiple references to other art forms and to a vast range of literature, both Western and Eastern. He influenced many other poets, notably T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), another expatriate. Eliot wrote spare, cerebral poetry, carried by a dense structure of symbols. In "The Waste Land" he embodied a jaundiced vision of post-World War I society in fragmented, haunted images. Like Pound's, Eliot's poetry could be highly allusive, and some editions of The Waste Land come with footnotes supplied by the poet. In 1948, Eliot won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
American writers also expressed the disillusionment following upon the war. The stories and novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) capture the restless, pleasure-hungry, defiant mood of the 1920s. Fitzgerald's characteristic theme, expressed poignantly in The Great Gatsby, is the tendency of youth's golden dreams to dissolve in failure and disappointment.
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) saw violence and death first-hand as an ambulance driver in World War I, and the senseless carnage persuaded him that abstract language was mostly empty and misleading. He cut out unnecessary words from his writing, simplified the sentence structure, and concentrated on concrete objects and actions. He adhered to a moral code that emphasized courage under pressure, and his protagonists were strong, silent men who often dealt awkwardly with women. The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms are generally considered his best novels; in 1954, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
In addition to fiction, the 1920s were a rich period for drama. There had not been an important American dramatist until Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) began to write his plays. The 1936 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, O'Neill drew upon classical mythology, the Bible, and the new science of psychology to explore inner life. He wrote frankly about sex and family quarrels, but his preoccupation was with the individual's search for identity. One of his greatest works is Long Day's Journey Into Night, a harrowing drama, small in scale but large in theme, based largely on his own family.
Another strikingly original American playwright was Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), who expressed his southern heritage in poetic yet sensational plays, usually about a sensitive woman trapped in a brutish environment. Several of his plays have been made into films, including A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
Five years before Hemingway, another American novelist had won the Nobel Prize: William Faulkner (1897-1962). Faulkner managed to encompass an enormous range of humanity in Yoknapatawpha, a Mississippi county of his own invention. He recorded his characters' seemingly unedited ramblings in order to represent their inner states -- a technique called "stream of consciousness." (In fact, these passages are carefully crafted, and their seeming randomness is an illusion.) He also jumbled time sequences to show how the past -- especially the slave-holding era of the South -- endures in the present. Among his great works are The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, Go Down, Moses, and The Unvanquished.
Faulkner was part of a southern literary renaissance that also included such figures as Truman Capote (1924-1984) and Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964). Although Capote wrote short stories and novels, fiction and nonfiction, his masterpiece was In Cold Blood, a factual account of a multiple murder and its aftermath, which fused dogged reporting with a novelist's penetrating psychology and crystalline prose. Other practitioners of the "nonfiction novel" have included Norman Mailer (1923- ), who wrote about an antiwar march on The Pentagon in Armies of the Night, and Tom Wolfe (1931- ), who wrote about American astronauts in The Right Stuff.
Flannery O'Connor was a Catholic -- and thus an outsider in the heavily Protestant South in which she grew up. Her characters are Protestant fundamentalists obsessed with both God and Satan. She is best known for her tragicomic short stories.
The 1920s had seen the rise of an artistic black community in the New York City neighborhood of Harlem. The period called the Harlem Renaissance produced such gifted poets as Langston Hughes (1902-1967), Countee Cullen (1903-1946), and Claude McKay (1889-1948). The novelist Zora Neale Hurston (1903-1960) combined a gift for storytelling with the study of anthropology to write vivid stories from the African-American oral tradition. Through such books as the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God -- about the life and marriages of a light-skinned African-American woman -- Hurston influenced a later generation of black women novelists.
1945 - early 2000s
After World War II, a new receptivity to diverse voices brought black writers into the mainstream of American literature. James Baldwin (1924-1987) expressed his disdain for racism and his celebration of sexuality in Giovanni's Room. In Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison (1914-1994) linked the plight of African Americans, whose race can render them all but invisible to the majority white culture, with the larger theme of the human search for identity in the modern world.
In the 1950s the West Coast spawned a literary movement, the poetry and fiction of the "Beat Generation," a name that referred simultaneously to the rhythm of jazz music, to a sense that post-war society was worn out, and to an interest in new forms of experience through drugs, alcohol, and Eastern mysticism. Poet Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) set the tone of social protest and visionary ecstasy in Howl, a Whitmanesque work that begins with this powerful line: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness...." Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) celebrated the Beats' carefree, hedonistic life-style in his episodic novel On the Road.
From Irving and Hawthorne to the present day, the short story has been a favorite American form. One of its 20th-century masters was John Cheever (1912-1982), who brought yet another facet of American life into the realm of literature: the affluent suburbs that have grown up around most major cities. Cheever was long associated with The New Yorker, a magazine noted for its wit and sophistication.
Postmodernism
In American literature, from roughly the early 1970s until present day, the most well known literary category, though often contested as a proper title, has been Postmodernism. Notable, intellectually well-received writers of the period have included Thomas Pynchon, Tim O'Brien, Robert Stone, Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, Joyce Carol Oates and Annie Dillard. Authors typically labeled Postmodern have dealt with and are today dealing directly with many of the ways that popular culture and mass media have influenced the average American's perception and experience of the world, which is quite often criticized along with the American government, and, in many cases, with America's history, but especially with the average American's perception of his or her own history.
Many Postmodern authors are also well known for setting scenes in fast food restaurants, on subways, or in shopping malls; they write about drugs, plastic surgery, and television commercials. Sometimes, these depictions look almost like celebrations. But simultaneously, writers in this school take a knowing, self-conscious, sarcastic, and (some critics would say) condescending attitude towards their subjects. Bret Easton Ellis, Dave Eggers, Chuck Palahniuk, and David Foster Wallace are, perhaps, most well known for these particular tendencies.

312.Herman Melville ―Moby Dick. Plot analyzing.

Moby Dick, novel by Herman Melville, published in London in October 1851 as The Whale and a month later in New York City as Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. It is dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Moby Dick is generally regarded as Melville’s magnum opus and one of the greatest American novels.
Moby Dick, illustration by Rockwell Kent for a Lakeside Press edition (1930) of Herman Melville's Moby Dick.
The Newberry Library, Gift of Dan Burne Jones, 1978 (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
Plot summary
Moby Dick famously begins with the narratorial invocation “Call me Ishmael.” The narrator, like his biblical counterpart, is an outcast. Ishmael, who turns to the sea for meaning, relays to the audience the final voyage of the Pequod, a whaling vessel. Amid a story of tribulation, beauty, and madness, the reader is introduced to a number of characters, many of whom have names with religious resonance. The ship’s captain is Ahab, who Ishmael and his friend Queequeg soon learn is losing his mind. Starbuck, Ahab’s first-mate, recognizes this problem too, and is the only one throughout the novel to voice his disapproval of Ahab’s increasingly obsessive behavior. This nature of Ahab’s obsession is first revealed to Ishmael and Queequeg after the Pequod’s owners, Peleg and Bildad, explain to them that Ahab is still recovering from an encounter with a large whale that resulted in the loss of his leg. That whale’s name is Moby Dick. The Pequod sets sail, and the crew is soon informed that this journey will be unlike their other whaling missions: this time, despite the reluctance of Starbuck, Ahab intends to hunt and kill the beastly Moby Dick no matter the cost.
The Seamen's Bethel (chapel), New Bedford, Massachusetts, showing the cenotaphs described in Herman Melville's Moby Dick on the walls.
Mark Sexton
Sherlock Holmes explaining to Dr. Watson what he has deduced from the pipe left behind by a visitor (see Notes); engraving from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the Yellow Face by Arthur Conan Doyle, The Strand Magazine, London, 1893.
Characters in Literature
What did the Wicked Witch of the West demand of Dorothy? Who was the sole survivor of the Pequod? Test your knowledge of Heathcliff, Mowgli, and more in this quiz of literary characters.
Ahab and the crew continue their eventful journey and encounter a number of obstacles along the way. Queequeg falls ill, which prompts a coffin to be built in anticipation of the worst. After he recovers, the coffin becomes a replacement lifeboat that eventually saves Ishmael’s life. Ahab receives a prophecy from a crew member informing him of his future death, which he ignores. Moby Dick is spotted and, over the course of three days, engages violently with Ahab and the Pequod until the whale destroys the ship, killing everyone except Ishmael. Ishmael survives by floating on Queequeg’s coffin until he is picked up by another ship, the Rachel. The novel consists of 135 chapters, in which narrative and essayistic portions intermingle, as well as an epilogue and front matter.
Interpreting Moby Dick
Moby Dick can sustain numerous, if not seemingly infinite, readings generated by multiple interpretative approaches. One of the most fruitful ways to appreciate the novel’s complexity is through the names that Melville gave to its characters, many of which are shared with figures of the Abrahamic religions. The very first line of Moby Dick, for instance, identifies Ishmael as the narrator; Ishmael was the illegitimate (in terms of the Covenant) son of Abraham and was cast away after Isaac was born. There are a number of other Abrahamic names in the book as well, including Ahab—who, according to the Hebrew Bible, was an evil king who led the Israelites into a life of idolatry. Melville’s Ahab is obsessed with Moby Dick, an idol that causes the death of his crew. The ship that saves Ishmael, the Rachel, is named for the mother of Joseph, known for interceding to protect her children. It is Rachel, as depicted in the Book of Jeremiah, who convinced God to end the exile placed upon the Jewish tribes for idolatry. The rescue of Ishmael by the Rachel in Moby Dick can thus be read as his return from an exile caused by his complicity (because he was on the Pequod’s crew) in Ahab’s idolatry of the whale. Melville’s use of these names grants his novel a rich layer of additional meaning.
The whale itself is perhaps the most striking symbol in Moby Dick, and interpretations of its meaning range from the Judeo-Christian God to atheism and everything in between. Between the passages of carefully detailed cetology, the epigraphs, and the shift from a hero’s quest narrative to a tragedy, Melville set the stage for purposeful ambiguity. The novel’s ability to produce numerous interpretations is, perhaps, the main reason it is considered one of the greatest American novels.
Context and reception
Melville himself was well versed in whaling, as he had spent some time aboard the Acushnet, a whaling vessel, which gave him firsthand experience. He also did tremendous amounts of research, consulting a number of scientific sources as well as accounts of historical events that he incorporated into Moby Dick. In particular, the story of the Essex was one that fascinated Melville—and perhaps served as his primary inspiration for the novel. The Essex, a whaling vessel, was attacked by a sperm whale in 1820. The ship sank, and many of the crew members were either lost immediately or died of starvation as they awaited rescue for nearly eight months.
Melville also consulted the story of Mocha Dick, a famed whale who was, like Moby Dick, very white and aggressive and whose name was clearly an inspiration to Melville. Mocha Dick was often found off the coast of Chile in the Pacific Ocean, near Mocha Island. He lived during the early 19th century and became a legend among whalers. In 1839 a story about the whale was written in The Knickerbocker, which was likely the source of Melville’s discovery of Mocha Dick. Unlike Moby Dick, however, Mocha Dick was eventually killed and used for oil.
Melville befriended fellow author Nathaniel Hawthorne during the writing of Moby Dick, which led to him dramatically revising the narrative to make it more complex. The novel is dedicated to Hawthorne because of his impact on Melville and the novel.
Once the novel was published, the public was unimpressed. It sold fewer than 4,000 copies in total, with fewer than 600 in the United Kingdom. It was not until the mid-20th century that the novel became recognized as one of the most important novels in American literature.

313.Colonial American Literature. First American Novels

Background. During the 1780s Americans developed a growing interest in the relatively new literary form of the novel, reading books by British novelists such as Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding, as well as European authors. One particular favorite was German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), the story of a sensitive, alienated young romantic who commits suicide. The novel became especially popular after an American edition was published in Philadelphia in 1784. Yet despite the rise of novel reading, Americans in general remained highly ambivalent about the novel.
The Question of Morality. Some critics called novels frivolous and immoral diversions and expressed the fear that fiction would lure popular attention away from serious and edifying works such as history or religion. They also distrusted novels because of their imaginative quality, a deeply rooted prejudice with origins in the Puritan view that works of fiction were essentially lies. A more immediate source of this distrust was Scottish common-sense philosophy, which had an immense influence in early-national American thought and culture. Common-sense philosophers such as Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart, and Henry Home, Lord Karnes, gave primacy to actual experience over the realm of the possible or the ideal as the embodiment of reality. As a result, they were skeptical about the realm of the imagination, which dealt only with possible experience. In their view, then, novels were dangerous because they lacked any grounding in reality and truth.
The Power of Sympathy. In January 1789 a twenty-four-year-old Bostonian, William Hill Brown, a younger half brother of composer Mather Brown, sought to capitalize on the popularity of the novel—in particular The Sorrows of Young Werther —by publishing The Power of Sympathy, a tale of seduction generally considered the first American novel. Written in the epistolary, or novel-in-letters, form employed by Richardson in his widely read seduction novels Pamela (1740–1742) and Clarissa (1747–1748), Brown’s book received little attention. Aware of the deeply rooted social and philosophical misgivings about novels, Brown had tried to address concerns about the morality of fiction by giving his novel a didactic purpose: “to represent the specious causes, and to expose the fatal consequences, of seduction; to inspire the female mind with a principle of self complacency, and to promote the economy of human life.” Brown used the main plot—the story of Harriot and Harrington—to convey this lesson. Harrington is a rake who plots to seduce the beautiful Harriot, an orphan without wealth or social connections. Although Harrington repents of this scheme and decides to marry Harriot, the news that they are half brother and half sister results in the death of both characters: Harrington commits suicide with a copy of The Sorrows of Young Werther by his side, and Harriot dies from shock. While Brown expressed the hope that the tragic consequences of Harrington’s plans to seduce Harriot would serve as a warning against such immoral behavior, the sensationalistic appeal of his novel undermined his stated moral objectives.
Imagination and Reality. Brown also sought to legitimize his work by emphasizing its basis in fact, highlighting this quality with his subtitle, “The Triumph of Nature. Founded in Truth.” One of the subplots in his novel was based on a true story—the local scandal caused by the affair between Perez Morton, husband of poet Sarah Wentworth Morton, and the poet’s sister, Fanny Apthorp, who gave birth to her brother-in-law’s child. Brown drew directly on this series of events, which led to Fanny Apthorp’s suicide, in his story of Ophelia’s seduction by her brother-in-law Mr. Martin and her eventual suicide.
The Rise of the Novel. Brown’s novel went largely unnoticed—owing at least in part to attempts by the Apthorps and Mortons to suppress its publication. Yet, as Kenneth Silverman has pointed out, the publication of The Power of Sympathy marks the beginning of a huge upswing in Americans’ novel reading. Between 1744, when Benjamin Franklin published an American edition of Pamela, and 1789, fifty-six foreign novels were reprinted in America. Between the appearance of The Power of Sympathy and 1800 there were some 350 American editions of such works.

314.William Faulkner is a father of Modernism: ―Ulusses.

The essence of all the modernist writers was based on the biome of method and creativity. “Is it the method that inhibits the creative power?” (Wolf, 2009, p.86). According to Mark Schorer (1962), “the modern consciousness and spirit needed ways of expression underneath, that a technique of the surface alone cannot approach” (p.267). The point is to make the shift from a method focusing on the form to one focusing on the content. In this way all the creative power of this generation of writers would not be limited, but on the contrary, technique or method would open new horizons of expression and interpretation. Imagination too, would be perceived differently based on these developments in the literary procreation. Technique linked to a different assumption of the reality would bring forward the modern tradition and the modern writing. It is possible to trace common elements of technique, creative power, perception of reality, imagination and historiography in James Joyce and William Faulkner.
The Sound and the Fury and Ulysses are novel city. They explore the social, cultural and political environment of places, Joyce and Faulkner know very well. Every desire, of these authors, to portrait the universal might have been a result to render, with authenticity, their atmosphere. This preoccupation of Joyce and Faulkner, accompanied by their techniques of narration, served as a deep influence to the authors of the
same period or the coming generations. Daring experimental techniques in the center of their works might be augmented as a challenge to give voice to marginalized, hidden and suppressed historiography.
In his Nobel Price speech, Faulkner ( 1960) says “I decline to accept the end of man” (p.82) In this acceptance we uncover a “Utopia of Man”, as a result a “Utopia of existing”, filtered through his characters actions and experimental narrative styles. This utopia generates the apocalypse at the heart of his creative urge when he says that “the world [he] created as … a kind of keystone in the universe” (Faulkner, 1960, p.
82) would incite its disintegration and his characters too. Readers are presented with different kinds of apocalypse of the characters within Yoknapatawpha, be it individual apocalypse or biblical one.
As modernist writers, Joyce and Faulkner, reconstructed and readjusted their narrative spaces through a density of language. This density makes them influence and at the same time resemble one another in different perspectives. Their resemblance made Hartwick (1999) depict the narration in the Sound and the Fury as “more incoherent than Joyce” (p. 629), while Wyndham Lewis (1999) explains that Faulkner’s style is more “Joyce than Stein” (p. 643), because it demonstrates “Irish sentiment” (p. 643). Other critics, such as Ó Faoláin (1956) have put Faulkner within Irish atmosphere and environment saying that life in South America resonated as “very much like life in County Cork. There is the same passionate provincialism; the same local patriotism; the same southern nationalism … the same feeling that whatever happens in Ballydehob or in Jefferson has never happened anywhere else before, and is more important than anything that happened in any period of history in any part of the cosmos … .” (p.102).
In all his works Faulkner criticized the people and values of the South, creating a love-hate relationship. Because of his avant-garde experimentalism and the occurrence of many illogical aspects in his novels, Faulkner, was criticized by the majority of his contemporaries. Whether his works are “strictly speaking, clinics” (Lewis, 1999, p. 638), his followers are invited to read these narratives by perceiving the misfortunes and fixations of the sick and insane/lunatic. He invites all the world to follow the perspective of “the other” part of South America, which he inhabited with a range of outstanding characters- hunters, businessman, former black slaves, farmers, disposed Indians, aristocrats and numerous age groups of families travelling on different ranks of Southern society. This magnetism to the exploration of “the other” joins Faulkner to Joyce. While describing Joyce’s narrative style but also indirectly even talking about his influence in his writing, Faulkner (1960) declares that, “you should approach Joyce’s Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith”(p. 77). Joyce power of infection is even inspected in the biblical elements used so much by Faulkner.
The literary style of Joyce and Faulkner is highly experimental. Their complexity is entangled with the desire to retell their native stories perceived through the eyes of the overwhelmed and their literary cosmos, or their whole world apart, are a consequence to readopt their native spaces. This experimentation requires an obscurity of language, abandoning the linear technique of narration and exposition. This obscurity of style was in keeping with the intricacy of the subject, presented by the voice of marginalized and exploited. As a result, these works are full of repetition, long and puzzling sentences, multiple points of view, incoherent punctuation and troubling conclusions. Each of them produces neologism, signaling incoherence with limitations of a conventional language. Joyce includes Hiberno-English and Faulkner includes the African-American style of speaking as e way to illustrate the dissonance creation of voices and techniques, exposing their different cultural traditions. Joyce and Faulkner attack syntax. To Fadiman (1999), a critic of the syntactical structure of Faulkner, states that “as a technician … has Joyce … punch-drunk” (p. 263). The subject in Ulysses and The Sound and the Fury is non-narrative because the primary reason of their writing, as typical representatives of modernism, was to embody in the consciousness of their characters the confused relationships between the modern present and past historiography. The usage of time in these two authors is not a linear development of the plot. Past, present and future are mixed with one another making very difficult the reading for the general audience.

315.The Second World War in American literature.

The post-WWII American literature – its trends and themes.
The United States undoubtedly contributed to the end of the World War II by the support given to the Allies. 1945 is the year of the end of the war but at the same time it is the beginning of the United States’ domination almost on all fields on the international area. Before the World War II the cultural center of the world was Paris – after the war it was New York. That happened mostly because of the intellectual emigrants from Europe, who strengthen intellectual position of the United States. The best evidence of the United States’ domination in literature can be the number of literary Nobel Prizes. First was given to William Faulkner in 1949 and then to Ernest Hemingway in 1954, to John Steinbeck in 1962 and few more.
Because of the great development of American literature after 1945 it is hard to distinguish the most important theme, but I think that I should first of all write about post-modernist fiction. After the World War II writers started changing their way of writing from strict realism in American fiction to this post-modernist fiction, also known as ‘irrealism’ or ‘fabulation’. One of the first postmodernist writers was William Burroughts. In his books he is presenting a science – fiction world, probably created under the influence of his drug and alcohol addiction. In my opinion one of the best known writers of this literary genre was Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut had his own experiences connected with the war. In 1943 he was sent to Europe to fight on the war. A year later he was captured and taken to Dresden, where during the day he worked in a factory whereas nights the spent in old slaughterhouse. In February 1945 he was the witness of bombarding and this events were the main inspiration to write one of his best works ‘Slaughterhouse-five, or The Children’s Crusade’. This book, similarly to others, has the structure of the Bible – it is divided into numerous, short chapters. It is also full of grotesque characters and strange situations. In this novel Vonnegut combines the events that took place during the World War II, the bombing of Dresden, with some absurd and science fiction elements when he is meeting with Tralfamadorians. This book is showing the reader how huge and destructive is the power of war. We see a man that survived the War and his after war life is quite successful, but in fact it is superficial. The huge human tragedy that he witnessed changed his attitude to life. He is escaping into created world on order to escape from cruel reality, from the world that he cannot understand. His another book ‘Breakfast of Champions or Goodbye Blue Monday’ could be also called a science fiction novel. This is a story of two lonely men living in a created city. This book is a critique towards American way of life.
Years after the World War II are the years of great development of American drama. Artur Miller and Tennessee Williams are called the best dramatists of the 20th century. After the World War II writers started to show an individual character in a completely different way than this character used to be described in thirties. Now an individual is an ‘alienated’ character that does not belong to any group or society and this character’s biggest problem is his loneliness. One of the Williams’s characters complains that, “We’re all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins – for life”. Artur Miller is best known because of his cooperation with great theatre and film director Elia Kazari and of course because of his marriage with Marilyn Monroe. In his works, Artur Miller concentrated on the life of the individual, who has to face with some difficult decisions. Miller’s works touch on social and political themes. His best known book ‘The Crucible’ is the author’s interpretation of the Hollywood events in 1950s concerning the searching of the communists. The other dramatist Tennessee Williams in his works concentrated mainly on showing sudden changes in American society in 1940s and 1950s. His works are full of eroticism and homosexual characters (he was also gay). The action of his works is usually placed on the South of the United States. One of his best known works is ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’. The main character, Blanche Dubois, is a woman destroyed by life, that lives in a world of unreality, in which she is happy, ‘I don’t want realism…I want Magic! Yes, yes magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don’t tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the truth’. All of the Williams’s characters are afraid of the real life and of the destructive power of life. The way that they look at the world is quite different. Williams’s world is irrational whereas Miller’s world is quite rational and all things happen for a reason.
The other important theme in the American literature is the literature of the fact. The writer, that represents this trend the best is Truman Capote. He is famous mainly because of his two subtle and poetical works ‘Other Voices, Other Rooms’ and ‘The Grass Harp’. But undoubtedly his best known masterpiece is ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ wrote in 1958. Truman Capote is the precursor of documentary novels. In 1966 he wrote ‘In Cold Blood’ – the first novel of this literary genre. In this novel he describes a bloody crime committed by two young people and their later execution.
Another important literary genre at those times were detective novels. Although it is said that the inventor and the father of the modern mystery was Edgar Allan Poe in fact detective novels started to develop from the 1920s through their golden age in 1950s. At those times this novels were printed as cheap books. People used to buy them, read them and usually after few hours they threw them away and that is why only few examples of the oldest detective novels survived. One of the most famous mystery writers was Mary Roberts Rinehard. All her stories are very similar – the action takes place in some old house and the main character, the detective is an intelligent lady. Rex Stout is also worth mentioning , when writing about the authors of the mystery stories. He created a well-known character Nero Wolfe, commonly compared with Sherlock Holmes. In 1950s Dashiell Hammett created a new kind of detective story. In Hammett’s books a detective is no longer a brilliant hero but a common person. Crimes occurs in all parts of the society and even a detective has to act as a gangster in some situations to solve the mystery. Hammett’s most famous detective character is Sam Spade, played by Humphrey Bogard in a famous movie ‘Maltese Falcon’. Also another writer, Raymond Chandler, tried to create a similar character and he created Philip Marlowe. In fact Marlowe is not exactly like Sam Spade as he is more romantic and idealistic.
In the literature after WWII we can also find novels of manners, usually with philosophical massage of how to be happy in life and that all people should be surrounded by beloved people. The best example of the writer of this literary genre is William Wharton. His best known novel is ‘Birdy’, which is mainly appreciated for the psychological layer and the creation of the main character. For this novel Wharton was given a National Book Award.
As I wrote at the beginning of this work after World War II United States started to develop culturally, mainly because of the emigrants from Eastern Europe. It is especially well seen in the number and the extend of the literary genres used by writers. The most innovative was in my opinion the fact that writers started to write fiction, the fact that they decided to resign from complete realism in their works. The American literature after 1945 is more various than it has been ever before.

316.Sinclair Lewis. ―Babbit‖. . Writing style and Plot analyzing.

From a strictly technical point of view, Sinclair Lewis is deficient as a writer in a number of ways. During his lifetime, many critics particularly those who were unable to endorse his vision of America attacked him for his lack of artistry. Others, more sympathetic to Lewis' message, took the opposing position and refused to acknowledge any flaws in his technique. Needless to say, both groups of critics were wrong, although some of their specific evaluations were indeed correct. Now the furor surrounding Lewis is long gone, and it is possible to look at his writing technique and the content of his novels with more objectivity.
Most of Sinclair Lewis' faults as a writer are the result of a tendency toward immoderation and overstatement. Lewis is frequently carried away by his enthusiasm for his subject or for rhetorical devices, and he often forgets to restrain himself artistically. As a result, the same characteristics of his style may be praised or blamed, depending on the degree to which they are present in the examples selected for study.
For instance, Lewis often uses irony effectively and skillfully to emphasize his meaning and to help delineate character, as in the line, "Babbitt loved his mother, and sometimes he rather liked her. . ." On other occasions, however, as in the mechanical juxtapositioning of the dinner for the McKelveys with the dinner given by the Overbrooks, the comparison of events is significant, but the irony is oversimplified and artificial. Likewise, Lewis' pleasure with rhetoric now and then escapes the bounds of objectivity, and he ends up sounding like a neighborhood gossip. Lewis' descriptions are always humorous if one enjoys sarcasm.
For example, Lewis writes, "His shoes were black-laced boots, good boots, honest boots, standard boots, extraordinarily uninteresting boots." Lewis, of course, isn't really interested in the boots; he's characterizing Babbitt as good, honest, straight-laced, and "extraordinarily uninteresting." In contrast to this gossipy, sarcastic tone, Lewis can also swing to an opposite stylistic extreme — that of the syrupy, over-sentimental writer. For example, he describes Babbitt's adolescent-like dreams of the fairy girl as being "more romantic than scarlet pagodas by a silver sea."
Babbitt, the protagonist, sometimes seems slightly unreal, for he is such a stereotype and personification of the clichéd middle-class, Midwestern, polyester businessman. Babbitt is limited in the options open to him at any point since he usually acts as a representative of a certain class of man. At the same time, his loneliness and yearnings, as well as his vague sense of unhappy aimlessness are typical of modern man's dilemma; thus, many people can readily identify with Babbitt. As a result, despite his many personal defects and partly because of his stereotyped image, Babbitt has become in many ways an archetypal figure in the modern American mythos. Because Babbitt symbolizes the fear and pain of the individual made captive by a huge, commercial and industrial mass society, he has achieved a niche in our country's imagination and consciousness. Babbitt is the quintessential middle-class mediocre man; we see him trying to break the seams of mediocrity's straitjacket — and failing. Some people, of course, endorse mediocrity. Nebraska's former senator Roman Hruskra said that he supported a particular nominee to the Supreme Court because the mediocre people of this nation need a representative on the Supreme Court bench.
Clearly, Babbitt was written before the Vietnam War. It was written during an era when the United States had suddenly discovered that it was a major world political power and that its industrial, financial, and military might were unsurpassed. Following World War I, a wave of prosperity and self-confidence swept the nation. The vast majority of American people developed an egotistical belief in the superiority of themselves and their institutions. In the 1920s, America was chauvinistic, smug, intolerant, reactionary, and materialistic. It had contempt for anything foreign and, in its search for conformity, it distrusted and opposed anything unfamiliar or new. The strongest citadel of these narrow-minded beliefs was the Midwest, where Lewis grew up.
Lewis was a sensitive and perceptive observer of his fellow countrymen and their way of life. He proudly recognized his nation's legitimately great achievements, and he sensed the country's potential for even further greatness. However, he was also aware of America's rich democratic and spiritual heritage; he understood the value of respect and consideration for other peoples and other ways of life.

Throughout all his novels, Lewis attempts to expose the worst defects of America in the hope that he can warn his countrymen while there is still time. His satire is often brutal and bitter, and he made many enemies and offended people. He is sometimes guilty of injustice, exaggeration, disrespect, and lack of gratitude, but, nonetheless, for the first time, an American author tried to show his countrymen what they were really like under the surface of their lives. Through Lewis' efforts, and those writers and thinkers who were influenced by him, some of this country's worst failings were eventually rectified. While reading his novels, one notes that some of his criticisms are still relevant. This reaction is proof of how accurate and on-target Lewis' observations were.

Sinclair Lewis was one of the most profound and astute students of America in the twentieth century. He created an image of our national civilization to which Americans will always be obligated to compare themselves. He communicated his message with clarity, precision, and accuracy, and in a form that attracted a wide and varied audience. Few satirists have ever been able to do better.

317.The Post war novel. Harper Lee: ―To Kill Mockingbird.

To Kill a Mockingbird takes place in the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama, during the Great Depression. The protagonist is Jean Louise (“Scout”) Finch, an intelligent though unconventional girl who ages from six to nine years old during the course of the novel. She is raised with her brother, Jeremy Atticus (“Jem”), by their widowed father, Atticus Finch. He is a prominent lawyer who encourages his children to be empathetic and just. He notably tells them that it is “a sin to kill a mockingbird,” alluding to the fact that the birds are innocent and harmless.
When Tom Robinson, one of the town’s Black residents, is falsely accused of raping Mayella Ewell, a white woman, Atticus agrees to defend him despite threats from the community. At one point he faces a mob intent on lynching his client but refuses to abandon him. Scout unwittingly diffuses the situation. Although Atticus presents a defense that gives a more plausible interpretation of the evidence—that Mayella was attacked by her father, Bob Ewell—Tom is convicted, and he is later killed while trying to escape custody. A character compares his death to “the senseless slaughter of songbirds,” paralleling Atticus’s saying about the mockingbird.
The children, meanwhile, play out their own miniaturized drama of prejudice and superstition as they become interested in Arthur (“Boo”) Radley, a reclusive neighbour who is a local legend. They have their own ideas about him and cannot resist the allure of trespassing on the Radley property. Their speculations thrive on the dehumanization perpetuated by their elders. Atticus, however, reprimands them and tries to encourage a more sensitive attitude. Boo makes his presence felt indirectly through a series of benevolent acts, finally intervening when Bob Ewell attacks Jem and Scout. Boo kills Ewell, but Heck Tate, the sheriff, believes it is better to say that Ewell’s death occurred when he fell on his own knife, sparing the shy Boo from unwanted attention. Scout agrees, noting that to do otherwise would be “sort of like shootin’ a mockingbird.”
To Kill a Mockingbird is both a young girl’s coming-of-age story and a darker drama about the roots and consequences of racism and prejudice, probing how good and evil can coexist within a single community or individual. Scout’s moral education is twofold: to resist abusing others with unfounded negativity but also to persevere when these values are inevitably, and sometimes violently, subverted. Criticism of the novel’s tendency to sermonize has been matched by praise of its insight and stylistic effectiveness.
Lee reportedly based the character of Atticus Finch on her father, Amasa Coleman Lee, a compassionate and dedicated lawyer and newspaper editor. The plot of To Kill a Mockingbird was inspired in part by his unsuccessful youthful defense in 1919 of two African American men convicted of murder, the only criminal case he ever took.
One character from the novel, Charles Baker (“Dill”) Harris, is based on Truman Capote, Lee’s friend since childhood and next-door neighbour in Monroeville, Alabama. Lee served as the basis of the tomboy Idabel Thompkins in Capote’s first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948). In the winter of 1959–60, just before the release of To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee journeyed to Kansas with Capote and helped him in the research for his “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood, about the murder of four members of the Clutter family. After the phenomenal success that followed the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird and the lack of further novels from Lee, some suspected that Capote was the actual author of Lee’s work, a rumour put to rest when, in 2006, a 1959 letter from Capote to his aunt was found, stating that he had read and liked the draft of To Kill a Mockingbird that Lee had shown him but making no mention of any role in writing it.
The novel inspired adaptations, the most notable of which was the classic 1962 film starring Gregory Peck as Atticus. His Academy Award-winning performance became an enduring part of cinema history. (Robert Duvall made his film debut as Boo Radley.) Aaron Sorkin adapted the novel into a Broadway play that debuted in 2018. (Lee’s estate sued over Sorkin’s adaptation in which Atticus rather than Scout was the main character, but the dispute was resolved before the play opened.)
In 2015 Lee released a second novel: Go Set a Watchman, written just before To Kill a Mockingbird but set 20 years later featuring Scout as a grown woman based in New York City who returns to her Alabama childhood home to visit her father. Although some claimed Go Set a Watchman is an earlier draft of To Kill a Mockingbird, it was actually Lee’s first novel, completed in 1957. Lee then began a second novel incorporating short stories based on her childhood. Lee was encouraged by her agent Maurice Crain to finish the second novel and not try to merge the two books. However, after the enormous success of To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee set Go Set a Watchman aside, and the completed manuscript of that novel languished in a safe-deposit box in Monroeville for decades. Go Set a Watchman excited controversy because it depicts Atticus as an ardent segregationist whose views horrify Scout, who has to reconcile Atticus’s racist attitudes with the kindly and loving father of her childhood memories.

318.American literature of the second half of the twentieth century

On a general cultural level America has had and continues to have enormous influence on Britain. Through the media of television and film, American popular culture is as at home in the front rooms and cinemas of Cheltenham as it is in those of Chicago. America has also led the way in certain artistic fields. Of undoubted significance was the emergence of Pop Art in the 1960s as championed by Andy Warhol, who used the styles and themes of popular culture to create a new form of visual expression.
Fiction
In the world of English letters America also continued to be a major from different ethic and social backgrounds produced novels that reflected the complex and varied structure of American society.
The late 1950s and 1960s witnessed a sociological revolution that had profound repercussions in literary circles. The philosophy of ‘Make love, not war’, the acceptance of the use of recreational drugs and a hostile attitude to any form of authority were the hallmarks of the Beat Generation.
The millions of young people who made up this unofficial movement found an influential spokesman in Jack Kerouac (1922-1969). His novel, On the Road (1957), about a group of friends who enjoy sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll as they travel across the United States, soon achieved cult status.
The voice of black America was also heard as the country was forced by the Civil Rights Movement to redress the mistakes of the past and move towards the building of a just, multiracial society. James Baldwin (1924-1987) courageously described what life was like for a black homosexual in Another Country (1962), while today Tony Morrison (1931) skillfully depicts the past and present of black America. Beloved (1987) is set in the past and tells the story of a mother who kills her children rather than see them live in slavery, while Jazz (1922) moves from the past to the present and back again as it examines love, life and death in a big northern city.
Other women writers who have made a significant impression are Joyce Carol Oates (1938) and Mary McCarthy (1912-1989). Oates is one of America’s most prolific writers who often pinpoints the violent nature of American life in novels like Foxfire (1993), which is about a gang of violent girls. McCarthy wrote about a wide range of topics that went from the Vietnam war to feminism. One of her most successful novel was Birds of America (1971) which relays the impressions of a young American who lives in Europe.
The Jewish community has produced two outstanding writers. Saul Bellow (1915-2005) creates memorable middle-aged male characters in Herzog (1964) and Mr Sammler’s Planet (1974), who carefully observe daily routine and philosophize about life in general. The work of Isaak B.Singer (1904-1991) examines his Polish-Jewish roots and the spiritual strength that can still be got from a community that was almost totally annihilated. One of his finest novels is The Magician of Lublin (1960).
The unique variety of American fiction makes it difficult to single out individuals for special mention, though few would argue that J.D. Salinger (1919-2010), Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) and John Updike (1932-2009) deserve special mention. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), which tells the story of a few days in the life of a disturbed teenager, has become a favorite with young people and adults around the world. Although a Russian immigrant, Nabokov is regarded as one of the finest stylists in the English language. His best known work, Lolita (1958), was a phenomenal success and created scandal in some circles, dealing as it did with a relationship between a middle-aged man and an adolescent girl. Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy about Harry Armstrong, which covers a period of over thirty years from the 1960s to the 1990s, provides the reader with a unique insight into American domestic life.
Over the last forty years a school of writers, that are grouped under the name of ‘minimalists’, has developed a novel and highly contemporary approach to fiction. While minimalist artists use the simplest and fewest materials to create maximum effect, writers like Raymond Carver (1938-1988) and David Leavitt (1961) employ a super-concise style to express content and concepts with a minimum of unnecessary decoration.
Poetry
Although poetry has not produced as rich a harvest as fiction over the last fifty years, a number of American poets have earned international reputations. Two major currents in particular can be identified. The Beat Poets, like Kerouac in fiction, became artistic mouthpieces for the younger generations. Meanwhile, poets like Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) and Robert Lowell (1917-1977) wrote a very private forms of verse that came to be known as confessional poetry.
The poetic equivalent of Jack Kerouac was Allen Ginsberg, whose poetry has been inextricably linked with the Beat Generation. His highly influential collection, Howl and Other Poems (1956), was a ringing condemnation of American society at the time. Ginsberg used a very elastic form of free verse and had a preference for long lines which were also sometimes used by America’s national poet and one of Ginsberg’s major influences, Walt Whitman.
Sylvia Plath wrote a much more personal form of poetry than Ginsberg. Her tormented inner life and troubled marriage to leading English poet Ted Hughes influenced her work which often deals with illness, sadness and death. Her major collection, Ariel (1965), also contains poems which display Plath’s wit, sense of humor and ability to delve beneath the surface of superficial reality.
Like Plath, Robert Lowell shocked his readers with the highly confessional nature of his collection, Dolphin (1973). He was however, unlike Plath, a very public figure who during his lifetime was probably the best known poet in America. Other poets to receive public and critical approval have been Adrienne Rich (1926), whose Diving into the Wreck (1972) focuses on feminist issues, while Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996), who only emigrated to the United States in 1972, is representative of artists and poets from other countries that have added new vigor to American literary tradition.
Drama
American drama enjoyed a golden era during the middle years of the twentieth century which was not matched towards the end of the century. Two of the dramatists who had contributed greatly to the golden era were still the major figures in the field of American drama in later years. Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana (1962) and Arthur Miller’s Broken Glass (1994) maintained these venerable playwrights’ reputations as the country’s leading dramatists. Of other dramatists to emerge, perhaps the most noteworthy is Edward Albee (1928). Some of his work has been associated with the theatre of the absurd and the tragicomedy about marriage, Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), has come in for special praise.

319.American literature of the first half of the twentieth century

At the beginning of the 20th century, American novelists were expanding fiction's social spectrum to encompass both high and low life. In her stories and novels, Edith Wharton (1862-1937) scrutinized the upper-class, Eastern-seaboard society in which she had grown up. One of her finest books, The Age of Innocence, centers on a man who chooses to marry a conventional, socially acceptable woman rather than a fascinating outsider. At about the same time, Stephen Crane (1871-1900) depicted the life of New York City prostitutes in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. And in Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) portrayed a country girl who moves to Chicago and becomes a kept woman.
Experimentation in style and form soon joined the new freedom in subject matter. In 1909, Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), by then an expatriate in Paris, published Three Lives, an innovative work of fiction influenced by her familiarity with cubism, jazz, and other movements in contemporary art and music.
The poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972) was born in Idaho but spent much of his adult life in Europe. His work is complex, sometimes obscure, with multiple references to other art forms and to a vast range of literature, both Western and Eastern. He influenced many other poets, notably T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), another expatriate. Eliot wrote spare, cerebral poetry, carried by a dense structure of symbols. In "The Waste Land" he embodied a jaundiced vision of post-World War I society in fragmented, haunted images. Like Pound's, Eliot's poetry could be highly allusive, and some editions of The Waste Land come with footnotes supplied by the poet. In 1948, Eliot won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
American writers also expressed the disillusionment following upon the war. The stories and novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) capture the restless, pleasure-hungry, defiant mood of the 1920s. Fitzgerald's characteristic theme, expressed poignantly in The Great Gatsby, is the tendency of youth's golden dreams to dissolve in failure and disappointment.
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) saw violence and death first-hand as an ambulance driver in World War I, and the senseless carnage persuaded him that abstract language was mostly empty and misleading. He cut out unnecessary words from his writing, simplified the sentence structure, and concentrated on concrete objects and actions. He adhered to a moral code that emphasized courage under pressure, and his protagonists were strong, silent men who often dealt awkwardly with women. The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms are generally considered his best novels; in 1954, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
In addition to fiction, the 1920s were a rich period for drama. There had not been an important American dramatist until Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) began to write his plays. The 1936 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, O'Neill drew upon classical mythology, the Bible, and the new science of psychology to explore inner life. He wrote frankly about sex and family quarrels, but his preoccupation was with the individual's search for identity. One of his greatest works is Long Day's Journey Into Night, a harrowing drama, small in scale but large in theme, based largely on his own family.
Another strikingly original American playwright was Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), who expressed his southern heritage in poetic yet sensational plays, usually about a sensitive woman trapped in a brutish environment. Several of his plays have been made into films, including A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
Five years before Hemingway, another American novelist had won the Nobel Prize: William Faulkner (1897-1962). Faulkner managed to encompass an enormous range of humanity in Yoknapatawpha, a Mississippi county of his own invention. He recorded his characters' seemingly unedited ramblings in order to represent their inner states -- a technique called "stream of consciousness." (In fact, these passages are carefully crafted, and their seeming randomness is an illusion.) He also jumbled time sequences to show how the past -- especially the slave-holding era of the South -- endures in the present. Among his great works are The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, Go Down, Moses, and The Unvanquished.
Faulkner was part of a southern literary renaissance that also included such figures as Truman Capote (1924-1984) and Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964). Although Capote wrote short stories and novels, fiction and nonfiction, his masterpiece was In Cold Blood, a factual account of a multiple murder and its aftermath, which fused dogged reporting with a novelist's penetrating psychology and crystalline prose. Other practitioners of the "nonfiction novel" have included Norman Mailer (1923- ), who wrote about an antiwar march on The Pentagon in Armies of the Night, and Tom Wolfe (1931- ), who wrote about American astronauts in The Right Stuff.
Flannery O'Connor was a Catholic -- and thus an outsider in the heavily Protestant South in which she grew up. Her characters are Protestant fundamentalists obsessed with both God and Satan. She is best known for her tragicomic short stories.
The 1920s had seen the rise of an artistic black community in the New York City neighborhood of Harlem. The period called the Harlem Renaissance produced such gifted poets as Langston Hughes (1902-1967), Countee Cullen (1903-1946), and Claude McKay (1889-1948). The novelist Zora Neale Hurston (1903-1960) combined a gift for storytelling with the study of anthropology to write vivid stories from the African-American oral tradition. Through such books as the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God -- about the life and marriages of a light-skinned African-American woman -- Hurston influenced a later generation of black women novelists.

320.African-American literature

African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. The genre traces its origins to the works of such late eighteenth century writers as Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano, reaching early high points with slave narratives and the Harlem Renaissance, and continuing today with authors such as Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and Walter Mosley. Among the themes and issues explored in African American literature are the role of African Americans within the larger American society, African-American culture, racism, slavery, and equality. African American writing has also tended to incorporate oral forms such as spirituals, sermons, gospel music, blues, and rap.
As African Americans' place in American society has changed over the centuries, so, too, have the foci of African American literature. Before the American Civil War, African American literature primarily focused on the issue of slavery, as indicated by the subgenre of slave narratives. At the turn of the twentieth century, books by authors such as W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington debated whether to confront or appease racist attitudes in the United States. During the American Civil Rights movement, authors such as Richard Wright and Gwendolyn Brooks wrote about issues of racial segregation and black nationalism. Today, African American literature has become accepted as an integral part of American literature, with books such as Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley, The Color Purple by Alice Walker, and Beloved by Toni Morrison, achieving both best-selling and award-winning status.
Characteristics and themes
In broad terms, African American literature can be defined as writings by people of African descent living in the United States of America. However, just as African American history and life is extremely varied, so too is African American literature.[2] Nonetheless, African American literature has generally focused on themes of particular interest to Black people in the United States, such as the role of African Americans within the larger American society and what it means to be an American.[3] As Princeton University professor Albert J. Raboteau has said, all African-American studies, including African American literature, "speaks to the deeper meaning of the African-American presence in this nation. This presence has always been a test case of the nation's claims to freedom, democracy, equality, the inclusiveness of all."[3] African American Literature explores the very issues of freedom and equality which were long denied to Black people in the United States, along with further themes such as African American culture, racism, religion, slavery, and a sense of home, among others.[4]
African American literature constitutes a vital branch of the literature of the African diaspora, and African American literature has both influenced by the great African diasporic heritage[2] and in turn influenced African diasporic writings in many countries. African American literature exists within the larger realm of post-colonial literature, even though scholars draw a distinctive line between the two by stating that "African American literature differs from most post-colonial literature in that it is written by members of a minority community who reside within a nation of vast wealth and economic power."
African American oral culture is rich in poetry, including spirituals, African American gospel music, blues, and rap. This oral poetry also shows up in the African American tradition of Christian sermons, which make use of deliberate repetition, cadence and alliteration. African American literature—especially written poetry, but also prose—has a strong tradition of incorporating all of these forms of oral poetry.
However, while these characteristics and themes exist on many levels of African American literature, they are not the exclusive definition of the genre and don't exist within all works within the genre. There is resistance to using Western literary theory to analyze African American literature. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., one of the most important African American literary scholars, once said, "My desire has been to allow the black tradition to speak for itself about its nature and various functions, rather than to read it, or analyze it, in terms of literary theories borrowed whole from other traditions, appropriated from without."