Gulistan state university department of the english language and literature course paper

Ancient American literature


John Smith: Virginia Map of Virginia from John Smith's The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles, 1624.Image courtesy of Documenting the American South, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries


The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in AmericaTitle page of Anne Bradstreet's The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, 1650.From The Works of Anne Bradstreet in Prose and Verse, edited by John Harvard Ellis, 1867




Poor Richard's almanac
Title page for Poor Richard's almanac for 1739, written, printed, and sold by Benjamin Franklin.
Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress, Washington




Common Sense
Title page from Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense, 1776.
Library of Congress, Washington

Washington Irving Washington Irving, 19th-century print.Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam




Holmes, Oliver Wendell
Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Prints and Photographs Division/Library of Congress, Washington

Henry David Thoreau: Walden Pond cabin
Henry David Thoreau's cabin, illustration from the title page of an edition of his Walden, which was first published in 1854.
From Walden; or, Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau, 1854




Harriet Beecher Stowe
Harriet Beecher Stowe, c. 1880.
Library of Congress, Washington




Whitman, Walt
Walt Whitman, c. 1870.
Feinberg-Whitman Collection/Library of Congress, Washington

(From left) Josh Billings, Mark Twain, and Petroleum V. Nasby, 1868.
Library of Congress, Washington


James, Henry
Henry James, glass plate negative, c. 1910.
Library of Congress, Washington




Ida Tarbell
Ida Tarbell, 1904.
Library of Congress, Washington




Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson, daguerreotype, c. 1847.
Amherst College Archives & Special Collections (Public Domain)

Robert Frost
Robert Frost, 1954.
Ruohomaa/Black Star


Hughes, Langston
Langston Hughes, photograph by Jack Delano, 1942.
Jack Delano—OWI/Library of Congress, Washington,



F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Public Domain



Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston, photograph by Carl Van Vechten, 1938.
Carl Van Vechten Estate/Library of Congress

CONCLUSION


Some historians, looking back over the first half of the 20th century, were inclined to think that it was particularly noteworthy for its literary criticism. Beyond doubt, criticism thrived as it had not for several generations. It was an important influence on literature itself, and it shaped the perceptions of readers in the face of difficult new writing.
The period began with a battle between two literary groups, one that called its movement New Humanism and stood for older values in judging literature and another group that urged that old standards be overthrown and new ones adopted. The New Humanists, such as Irving Babbitt, a Harvard University professor, and Paul Elmer More, were moralists whose work found an echo in neotraditionalist writers such as T.S. Eliot, who shared their dislike of naturalism, Romanticism, and the liberal faith in progress.

REFERENCES

1 For an example of the diversity of work that fits under the rubric of cultural studies see the collection of essays edited by Grossberg, Lawrence, Nelson, Cary, and Treichler, Paula A. under the title Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992)Google Scholar.


2 For the classic example see Matthiessen, F. O., American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941)Google Scholar.


3 Perhaps the scholar most identified with the effort to dismantle the canon of the American renaissance in the 1980s was Tompkins, Jane, with her Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985)Google Scholar. Walter Benn Michaels, Donald Pease, and Eric Sundquist also published important works challenging the established narrative of nineteenth-century American literary history.