Mamatqulova Sarvinoz (group – 240) Analysis of depicting Dark Fantasy elements in the novel The Stand Stephen King

CONCLUSION
Like most of his American contemporaries in the literary avant-garde of the 1920's and 1930's, Nathanael West consciously sought new artistic and intellectual stimulus from European rather than American sources. A few Americans did not. William Carlos Williams praised the pessimistic, pre-Spenglerian poetry of Edgar Allan Poe. Hart Crane embraced the dark psychophysical mysteries of the sea which Herman Melville had delineated. But they were part of a tiny minority. On the whole, young writers regarded the American literary record as one dominated by superficiality and emptiness, by a vapid contentment with things as they were that discouraged probe and experiment.
William Dean Howells, the novelist-critic who had begun his career in the 1860's and was still alive in 1920, symbolized for them the fossilized state of the American arts. Forgotten were his successful championship of literary realism, his laudable introduction to the United States of nineteenth-century masters from Russia, Italy, and France. American literature from its start, the avant-gardists angrily insisted, had been heading for the dead end epitomized by Howells's famous advice that the American writer should portray the smiling aspects of the national life instead of those which writhed hidden away on its dark underside.
Howells's penchant for happy comedy that softened tragedy represents the profound streak of optimism in the American character. It has been one of the sustaining factors in the national experience ever since English Puritans and other refugees from European reality first landed on this continent. However, high hopes of creating a spiritual and material paradise on earth have often been frustrated. So it was in the American beginning. Aspiration clashed with the uncontrollable, dream with fact. The Puritan temper was compelled to reconcile incompatibles. Its zealous religious faith was balanced with gloomy foreboding. By 1676, the Puritan poet-satirist Benjamin Tompson typically mourned the moral and social decline of a culture merely fifty years old, satirizing church, government, and men alike for failing to uphold the norms and patterns that had made life free and happy in the past. It was equally in order for Tompson to poke fun at Boston women and Harvard academics, intermingling his gayety with lines and scenes of deeply somber tone. A more toughly humorous mood than Howells displayed had been part of the American scene long before the twentieth century.
Puritan culture merits special attention because many contemporary black humorists believe that Puritanism banished love, life, and laughter from North America. It would be more accurate to say that Puritans did their best to come to realistic grips with the limitations inherent in the human condition. Furthermore, they actually cherished humor and applied its liberating, restorative spirit to aspects of daily existence that, like war and death, were embittering. The Reverend Richard Bernard declared in 1626, for example, that “there is a kind of smiling and joyful laughter, for anything I know, which may stand with sober gravity, and with the best man's piety.” In 1707, the Reverend Benjamin Colman devoted three sermons to the improvement of humor, eager to reveal that in the eyes of nature, God, and Christianity humor was beautiful and essential.