Overview of American Literature Written by: Doaa Alaa Hashem MA Student Supervised by: Dr.

Sara Rashwan Faculty of Arts - English Department Ain Shams University

Overview of American Literature Colonial/ Puritan Period (1620-1750) Social background: The first permanent English settlement in North America was established at Jamestown, Virginia in 1617. Newly arrived colonists create villages and towns and establish new governments while protesting the old ways in Europe Did not consider themselves Americans until mid-18C Enormous displacement of Native-American civilizations o FrenchSt Lawrence River o SwedesDelaware River o DutchHudson River o German and Scots-IrishNew York and Pennsylvania o SpanishFlorida o Africans (mostly slaves) were throughout the colonies Literature: Literature of the period dominated by the Puritans and their religious influence. Puritans emphasized hard work, piety and sobriety; The earliest writings include diaries, traveling books, journals, letters, sermons even government contracts.
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o emphasis is on faith in ones daily life a persons fate is determined by God all are corrupt and need a Savior

o theocracy- civil authority in Bible and church o nature is revelation of Gods providence and power o Puritan work ethicbelief in hard work and simple, no-frills living Writing is utilitarian; writers are amateurs (not professional writers) Writing is instructivesermons, diaries, personal narratives, Puritan Plain Style simple, direct Representative authors: o Wiliam Bradford (journal), o Anne Bradstreet (poetry), o Jonathan Edwards (sermon), o Mary Rowlandson (captivity narrative), o Phillis Wheatley (poetry), o Olaudah Equiano (slave narrative)

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Age of Reason or Revolutionary Period (1750-1815) Social background: The War for Independence lasted for eight years (1776 - 1783)

Literature: Writers focused on explaining and justifying the American Revolution After the Revolution, this period becomes known as Early Nationalism. Writers begin to ponder what it really means to be an American. After the War of 1812, which removed the last British troops from North America, there was an even greater focus on nationalism, patriotism, and American identity Emphasis on reason as opposed to faith alone; rise of empirical science, philosophy, theology Shift to a more print-based culture; literacy seen as sign of status Instructive in values, highly ornate writing style; highly political and patriotic Representative authors: o The earliest writer Benjamin Franklin and Poor Richards Almanac and Autobiography which is the recording of his rising from a state of poverty and obscurity to wealth and fame. Mottos in Poor Richards Almanac: Lost time is never found again.
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A penny saved is a penny earned. Fish and visitors stink in three days. Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.

o Other important figures Thomas Paine: Common Sense and American Crisis (pamphlets), o Thomas Jefferson: The Declaration of Independence documents), o Philip Freneau and his poems, o Patrick Henry and his speech, o Abigail Adams (letters) Romantic Period (1820 1865) Social background: Industrial Revolution; Revolution in transportation, science, Industrial revolution made old ways of doing things irrelevant western expansion; immigrants contribution; political ideal of equality and democracy; the influence of European Romanticists
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(political

Optimistic period of invention, Manifest Destiny, abolition movement

Literature: American Romanticism is a philosophical reaction to the previous decades in which reason and rational thought dominated: o the birth of truly American literature; o the first American Renaissance; o emphasis on universal human experience o emphasis upon the imaginative and emotional qualities of literature; imagination prized over reason; intuition over fact o a liking for the picturesque, the exotic, the sensuous, the sensational, fantasy and the supernatural; Growth of urban population in the Northeast with growth of newspapers, lectures, debates (especially over slavery and womens roles) Writers celebrated individualism with a strong tendency to exalt the individual common man, imagination, creativity, and emotions. o Writing can usually be interpreted two wayssurface and in depth o Writing is didacticattempting to shape readers o Good will triumph over evil. o Strong focus on inner feelings

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Blossoming of short stories, novels, and poetry Early Romantic authors began the tradition of creating imaginative literature that was distinctly American such as William Cullen Bryant (poetry)

Fireside Poets, the most popular Romantic poets of the time, were read in the home by the fireside because their poetry contained strong family values, patriotism, etc. It has remained popular in elementary schools for memorization. o Henry Wadsworth Longfellow o Oliver Wendell Holmes o James Russell Lowell o John Greenleaf Whittier

Transcendentalism came to America from Europe It represented romanticism on the Puritan soil; emphasis on spirit, or the Oversoul; a transparent eyeball;

the stress of the importance of the individual as the most important element of society;

a fresh perception of nature as symbolic of the spirit or God; belief that mans nature is inherently good; divine spark or inner-light belief that man and society are perfectible (utopia) stress individualism, self-reliance, intuition

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o Ralph Waldo Emerson the chief spokesman of Transcendentalism; Nature regarded as the Bible of New England Transcendentalism; The American Scholar regarded as Americas Declaration of Intellectual Independence. o Henry David Thoreau; representative of Transcendentalism; Walden, a faithful record of his reflections when he was in solitary communication with nature. o Washington Irving father of American short stories; the first who won international fame; representative works The Sketch Book and two important humorous short stories Dark Romanticism (also known as Gothic or Anti-Transcendentalism) Belief that mans nature is inherently evil Belief that whatever is wrong with societysin, pain, evilhas to be fixed by fixing the individual man first. Use of supernatural Strong use of symbolism Dark landscapes, depressed characters o Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow o James Fenimore Cooper; father of American fiction; Leather Stocking Tales, a series of five novels about the frontier life of American settlers

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o Edgar Allan Poe; father of American detective stories; The Murders in the Rue Morgue; a great writer of fiction, a poet of the first rank, and a critic of acumen and insight; important short stories The Fall of the House of Usher, Ligeia o Hawthorne; his black vision of life and human being; evil as the trade mark of human being; his novels: The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables; short story like Young Goodman Brown o Melville; best known as the author of one book, MobyDick, an encyclopedia of everything, history, philosophy, religion, etc.; a Shakespearean tragedy of man fighting against overwhelming odds in an indifferent and even hostile universe Transitional writers which span the Romantic and Realistic Periods express transcendental ideas in poetry with realistic detail though their focus was still romantic. They experimented with new poetic techniques such as free verse and slant rhyme. o Walt Whitman; pioneer poet; free verse poetry basing on the irregular rhythmic cadence, no conventional use of meter, rhyme may or may not be present; Leaves of Grass, Song of Myself When Lilacs last in the Dooryard Bloomd o Emily Dickinson; very unique poet; the largest portion of her poetry concerns death and immortality I heard a fly buzz when I died, My life closed twice before its Close; no titles, always quoted by their first lines; dashes are used as a musical device to create cadence and capital

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letters as a means of emphasis; a single image; noted for laconic brevity, directness and plainness. Realism and Naturalism (1850-1900) Social Background One of the most turbulent in American history, which includes the Civil War, significant industrial inventions, and extensive westward expansion Literature: Realism was a rejection of Romantic view of life as too idealistic; it was a reaction against Romanticism or a move away from the bias towards romance and self-creating fictions; a great interest in the realities of life, everyday existence, what was brutal or sordid and class struggle; Three dominant figures, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and Henry James. o Henry James; psychological approach to his subject matter; concerned more with the inner life of human beings than with overt human actions; the forerunner of the 20th century stream of consciousness novels and the founder of psychological realism; international theme or American innocence in face of European sophistication; representative works: The Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassador, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl; point of view o Howell was influenced by Henry James. His main focus was on the rising middle class and the way they lived. In his public writing and in his novels, he drew attention to pressing social issues of the time. He

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published his first novel, Their Wedding Journey, in 1872, but his literary reputation soared with the realist novel A Modern Instance, published in 1882, which described the decay of a marriage. His 1885 novel The Rise of Silas Lapham became his best known, describing the rise and fall of an American entrepreneur of the paint business. His social views were also strongly represented in the novels Annie

Kilburn (1888), A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), and An Imperative Duty (1891). Writers seek verisimilitude by portraying a slice of life as it really is Usually objective narrator Realistic authors made it their mission to convey the reality of life, however harsh. Characters reflect ordinary people in everyday life, determined yet

flawed, struggling to overcome the difficulties of war, family, natural disasters, and human weaknesses. While good will always triumph over evil, it may not happen in every case in this lifetime Nature is a powerful force beyond mans control. Racism persisted beyond slaveryReconstruction, Jim Crow, KKK, etc. Local Colorism; Local color writers (also known as Regionalists) focused on a particular region of the country, seeking to represent accurately the culture and beliefs of that area.

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Considered the true beginning of Realism; the presentation and interpretation of the local character, the truthful color of local life.

Emphasized accurate portrayals of the physical landscape as well as the habits, occupations, and speech (dialect) of the areas people o Mark Twain, the true father of American literature by pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens; rough humor and social satire; magic power with language, the use of vernacular and colloquial speech; representative works: Adventure of Huckleberry Finn, Life on the Mississippi, The Adventure of Tom Sawyer o Bret Harte (the West, particularly the mining camps of California) o Kate Chopin (the South, particularly Louisiana) o Willa Cather (the Midwest, particularly Nebraska) o Mary Wilkins Freeman (the New England area)

Civil War writers are primarily concerned with the war, slavery, and to a lesser extent, womens suffrage. o Abraham Lincoln o Robert E. Lee o Mary Chesnut o Sojourner Truth o Harriet Beecher Stowe
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o John Parker o Frederick Douglass Mainline realistic authors include several well-known poets o Paul Laurence Dunbar o Edgar Lee Masters Realism took a cynical turn to Naturalism when literary writers were exposed to the views of three authors whose scientific or political works appeared near the end of the century. o Charles Darwinbiological determinism o Sigmund Freudpsychological determinism o Karl Marxsocio-economic determinism Emile Zola started this movement in France but it soon spread through Europe, England and America. They focused on materialism and lack of values due to the clash between profit and traditions. They also believed that humans are governed by four elements: o Passion: related to human desires and reactions, such as hatred, love, anger, revenge, etc These may be controlled to a certain extent. o Instincts: spontaneous, at the spur of the moment, so they can't be controlled like fear, survival, etc ...

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o Environment: either social or private and both affect the personality of humans o Heredity: a natural element which can never be changed. These are the core of naturalism and all the characters in naturalists' works are affected by these fir elements. The naturalists chose their subjects from the lower ranks of the society, portrayed misery and poverty of the underdogs who were demonstrably victims of society and nature. And one of the most familiar themes in American Naturalism is the theme of human bestiality, especially as an explanation of sexual desire. They focused on grim reality, observed characters much as scientists might observe laboratory animals, and sought to discover the natural laws which govern human lives. Naturalists viewed nature and the universe as indifferent, even hostile, to man. The universe of the naturalists is godless, cold, and indifferent. Life often seems meaningless. Fate = chance (no free will) The characters in these works are often helpless victimstrapped by nature, the environment, or their own heritage. o Jack London (novels, short stories): The Call of the Wild; Martin Eden

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o Stephen Crane (novels, short stories, poetry): Red Badge of Courage; Maggie, A Girl of the Street o Edwin Arlington Robinson (poetry) o Ambrose Bierce (short stories) o Frank Norris; McTeague o Theodore Dreiser; Sister Carrie; An American Tragedy Modernism (1900-1950) Social background: Booming industry and material prosperity in contrast with a sense of unease and restlessness underneath; a decline in moral standard described as a spiritual poverty; the impact of war feelings of fear, loss, disorientation and disillusionment Modern Period writers were affected by o World War I, World War II, fear of communism, and the beginning of the Cold War o Roaring 20s, the Great Depression, commercialism o increased population o lingering racial tensions after slavery and Reconstruction o technological changes

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o rise of the youth culture o fear over eroding traditions Literature: Imagist Movement; Modernism in poetry; the Lost Generation; Depression period; the Beat Movement; American fiction after WWII; New fiction; Twentieth century American Drama Modern writers are known for o themes of alienation and disconnectedness o frequent use of irony and understatement o experimentation with new literary techniques in fiction and poetry: stream of consciousness interior dialogue fragments

o trying to create a unique style o rise of ethnic and women writers The Lost Generation writers were a group of Americans who chose to live in Paris after WWI. It was a period of spiritual crisis; the second American Renaissance; the expatriate movement; young people volunteered to take part in the war to end

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wars, only to find that modern warfare was not glorious or heroic; the feeling of gloom and despair and cutoff; the sense of doom, dislocation and fragmentation; the term named by Gertrude Stein; Hemingway as the most representative Their writing explored themes of alienation and change and confronted peoples fears, despair, and disillusionment. o T. S. Eliot (poetry) o Ernest Hemingway awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1954 for his powerful Style-forming mastery of the art; Hemingway Code heroes: Man can be physically destroyed but never defeated spiritually; grace under pressure; Hemingway iceberg analogy: "The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only 1/8 of it being above water." Less is more his language or diction seemingly simple and natural, actually polished and tightly controlled, highly suggestive and connotative The Sun Also Rises; the impact of war on a whole generation A Farewell to Arms; man is doomed to be entrapped For Whom the Bell Tolls; a volunteer American fighting in the Spanish Civil War The Old Man and the Sea; a representation of life as a struggle against unconquerable natural forces

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o Fitzgerald mirror of the exciting age in almost every way; literary spokesman of the Jazz Age; The Great Gatsby; the Jazz Age of the 1920s characterized by frivolity and carelessness o Faulkner; his creation of a mythical kingdom that mirrors not only the decline of the southern society but also the spiritual wasteland of the whole American society; the use of stream of consciousness to emphasize the reactions and inner musings of the narrator; the use of multiple points of view giving the story a circular form; the use of montage, to fragment the chronological time by juxtaposing the past with the present; representative works: The Sound and the Fury; Light in August; Absalom, Absalom!; Go Down, Moses; A Rose for Emily o Sherwood Anderson exploring the motivations and frustrations in terms of Freuds theory of psychology, especially in Winesburg, Ohio o Sinclair Lewis; a sociological writer, Babbit as the presentation of a documentary picture of the narrow and limited middleclass mind Traditional poets in the Modern Period include such writers as Robert Frost Imagist Movement: Imagists were a subgroup of the Lost Generation that created a new kind of poetry. Their poetry, which highly resembles Japanese haiku, concentrates on creating a word picture, a snapshot of a moment in time Pound and Flint laid down three main principles: direct treatment of poetic subjects, elimination of merely ornamental or superfluous words, and rhythmical composition in the sequence of the musical phrase rather than in the sequence of

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a metronome. Pound and In a Station of the Metro; Sandburg and The Fog; William Carlos Williams and The Red Wheelbarrow. Imagists conveyed through poetry; the feeling of frustration and failure; t he commercialization and debasement of art in Pounds Mauberley; Pounds attempt to impose, through art, order and meaning upon a chaotic and meaningless world in Cantos; T. S. Eliot revealed the spiritual crisis of postwar Europe in his epochal epic "The Waste Land"; a trivial world of total emptiness and the split nature of modern man in Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock;; E. E. cummings disregarded grammar and punctuation, always used "i instead of I as a protest against self importance; Wallace S tevens focused his attention on man and things in his world; Robert Frost can hardly be classified with the old or the new The Depression period; the Great Depression (1929 - 1933); novels of social protest; John Steinbeck, a representative of the 1930s, his The Grapes of Wrath, a symbolic journey of man on the way to find some truth about life and himself, and a record of the dispossessed and the wretched farmers during the Great Depression Postmodernism or Contemporary Period (1950-present) Social background: unprecedented prosperity global conflict-- the end of the Cold War, the Korean war, the Vietnam war, the rise of terrorism, Gulf War, 9/11, Iraqi War. War in Afganistan

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social protestthe civil rights movement, the womens rights movement, the gay rights movement

mass culture and consumerism; media saturation rise of technology and space exploration the digital revolution

Literature The best adjective for this literary period is eclectica collection of a little bit of everything. Postmodernists create traditional works without traditional structure or narrative. The writings have increasingly addressed social issues related to gender and race and youthful rebellion. Questioning of traditional valuesinsistence that values are not permanent but only local or historical; media culture interprets values The writings are often critical and ironic, concentrating on surface realities and the absurdity of daily life. There are no heroes; anti-heroes are common Often detached, unemotional Individuals often seem isolated.

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The Quest For Identity o In the contemporary period, there is a marked shift from stories that showed realistic events and situations to portraying the inner experiences and sometimes irrational psychology of human beings. Contemporary literature main qualities are the quest for identity and Expressionism with key literary devices that are often used: the use of rhythm and juxtaposition. o In most American contemporary literature, the main characters are on a quest for identity. They are searching for who they are and struggling to find their place in the modern world. This quest to find one's self is often a lonely one, where the main character feels out of place, isolated, or misunderstood in society. In African American Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man, for example, the main character considers himself invisible because people constantly view him through a lens of racial prejudice. Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman shows the trials of Willy Loman, as he feels lost and left behind in a seemingly neverending quest to buy more. The most classic example of a hero on a quest to find himself is Holden Caulfield from African American writer J.D.

Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. He is isolated from mainstream culture and feels misunderstood by most people. He can be

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compared to other rebellious social outcasts like James Dean, Donnie Darko, or Max Fisher from Rushmore. Holden Caulfield isn't interested in growing up and getting a good job, playing golf, or climbing any social ladders, and he's sick of what he calls the 'bastards' and 'phonies' who are into that kind of stuff. He even feels alone around his peers most of the time. Take for example, his line about smoking: At the end of the first act we went out with all the other jerks for a cigarette. What a deal that was. You never saw so many phonies in all your life, everybody smoking their ears off and talking about the play so that everybody could hear and know how sharp they were. As you can tell, pretty much everyone and their mother is a 'phony jerk' for Holden. His alienation from society is clear, as he can be super crude and socially inappropriate, constantly flirting with older women, drinking alcohol underage, and swearing. But what really stands out with Holden Caulfield is the honesty in his voice as he talks openly about his internal struggle to find his place in what he sees as a world of jerks. Expressionism o Making personal psychological experience visible to the reader is another major element of contemporary literature, a trend known in literary circles as Expressionism. The idea here is to bring internal feelings and experiences to the surface, and a character's inner life is just as important, if not more important, than the external events taking place.
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Expressionism is the attempt to show the character's inner struggles, and writers in the contemporary period will illustrate the character's state of mind as often as possible. o For example, Holden Caulfield comments, When I really worry about something, I don't just fool around. I even have to go to the bathroom when I worry about something. Only, I don't go. I'm too worried to go. I don't want to interrupt my worrying to go. Here we see Holden's thoughts come to the surface, and as he works to find himself, he takes us on this journey exploring his inner thoughts. So you can see how if characters are on a quest for identity, Expressionism is a crucial element for this literature, as it allows authors to take unseen inner experiences and make them visible. Elements of Style: Use of Rhythm and Tone o This expression of emotional experience can take place not only in what is said but also in the rhythm that flows from the words being said. You might think about it like music. When you listen to a song, you can get an idea of the emotional state of the artist just by listening to the rhythm and tone - not even knowing what the words mean. o You can hear the use of rhythm and tone in the Latino American Sandra Cisneros' House on Mango Street. Here, the main character Esperanza comments, All brown all around, we are safe. But watch us drive into a neighborhood of another color and our knees go shakity-shake and our car windows get rolled up tight and our eyes look straight. The sound of the words 'All brown all around' creates a calming rhythm as the vowel
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sounds resonate off each other and flow slowly. We can hear the sounds change with the words 'knees go shakity-shake ... and our eyes look straight. As the words become clipped and repeat the sound of the sharp consonants, the rhythm and tone shifts, and this helps communicate the discomfort Esperanza feels while driving in a different neighborhood. Juxtaposition o As we have seen in the contemporary period, there is a definite shift from accurately portraying events in the physical world to accurately portraying the inner reality of humans. The goal of showing internal, psychological reality actually pushes aside the need to accurately show events, and writers can get super creative when it comes to how they show the inner workings of the human mind. In order to show the complexity of human experience, writers will blend and mix up events out of order, juxtaposing images from different times or spaces together, in order to create a sense or feeling. The term juxtaposition means placing images that normally aren't seen together, together, and the clash between these images highlights their differences. o You will see writers like Tennessee Williams and Ralph Ellison using juxtaposition and messing with the laws of physics by blending the past with the present. But the most classic example of juxtaposition is Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. In this play, the main character, Willy Loman, is often confronted with people and sounds from his past in his day-to-day life. For example, Willy will be having a regular conversation with his wife Linda about his day at work, and then randomly you'll hear
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the sound of a woman laughing and talking to Willy - a woman, it turns out, with whom he previously had an affair. This laughter can seem really odd and out of place, and it will only make sense if you remember this would never happen in reality, but it gives us a sense of how Willy is feeling - in this case, guilty and embarrassed. In this scene, Willy's discomfort and guilt is highlighted by putting the two images together, and the tension in dealing with them at the same time is felt. .American fiction after WWII; writings about traumatic war experience, The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer, Wind and War by Herman Wouk; writings about Southern life following Faulkners footsteps, A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery OConner; writings about Jewish experience (Saul Bellow, Issac Singer); writings about black people (Ralph Ellison); writings about the alienated youth, The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger; writings about middleclass life (Updike) The Beat Movement; the impact of WWII, the cold war, the Korean war, the Vietnam war, the assassination of Kennedy and of Martin Luther King ; the idea of life as a big joke or an absurdity; the more disintegrating and fragmentary world; more estranged and despondent people; all these factors affected a group of American post-World War II writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired. Central elements of "Beat" culture included rejection of received standards, innovations in style, experimentation with drugs, alternative sexualities, an interest in Eastern religion, a rejection of materialism, and explicit portrayals of the human condition.

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o Allen

Ginsberg's "Howl" (1956), William

S.

Burroughs's "Naked

Lunch" (1959) and Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" (1957) are among the best known examples of Beat literature. Both "Howl" and "Naked Lunch" were the focus of obscenity trials that ultimately helped to liberalize publishing in the United States. The members of the Beat Generation developed a reputation as new-bohemian hedonists, who celebrated non-conformity and spontaneous creativity. o The Beat Poets (pre-hippies, highly intellectual, countered the hidden despair of the 1950s with wildly exuberant language and behavior) Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg New Fiction: American fiction in the 1960s and 1970s proves to be different; writers like Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse Five), Joseph Heller (Catch22), John Bath, etc. shared almost the same belief that human beings are trapped in a meaningless world and that neither God nor man can make sense of the human condition Twentieth century American Drama has gained itself an indispensable position in the world of literature and also established its international reputation for its achievements in the realistic theatre, expressionist theatre, meta-theatre and feminist theater that are rooted in American social reality. American realistic theatre features a genre of modern tragedy in the strand that starts with Eugene ONeill, continues with Tennessee Williams and consummates with Arthur Miller, whose The Death of a Salesman depicts the social reality of ordinary American people. The legacy is preserved in the later generations of American playwright like Marsha Norman.
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Expressionist theatre gained a firm foothold in U.S. since Eugene ONeill thematically uses expressionistic devices in his Hairy Ape and other plays. Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller also use their expressionist dramaturgy effectively in Glass Menagerie and The Death of a Salesman, respectively.

Meta-theatrical arts are intensively and effectively invented by American playwright Thornton Wilder in his Our Town, an American classic that still holds the stage for nearly eighty years.

American feminist theater remains active in United States since 1970s. Marsh Normans Night Mother is regarded as one of the most important plays written by women playwrights who not only rival men playwrights with equally brilliant dramatic art but also improve American theater with a special insights of women playwrights.__

Southern Renaissance writers follow in the footsteps of the earlier local color writers in their focus on the South. o Katherine Ann Porter o William Faulkner o Flannery OConnor

Other representative authors: o John Updike o Truman Capote o Stephen King

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o Joyce Carol Oates o J. D. Salinger o James Thurber o Confessional Poets (used anguish of their own lives to reveal hidden despair)Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell Minority literature o One of the key developments in late-20th-century American literature was the rise to prominence of literature written by and about ethnic minorities beyond African Americans and Jewish Americans, who had already established their literary inheritances. This development came alongside the growth of the Civil Rights movements and its corollary, the Ethnic Pride movement. This helped establish the new ethnic literature as worthy objects of academic study, alongside such other new areas of literary study as women's literature, gay and lesbian literature, workingclass literature, postcolonial literature, etc ... o After being relegated to cookbooks and autobiographies for most of the 20th century, Asian American literature achieved widespread notice through Maxine Hong Kingston's fictional memoir, The Woman

Warrior (1976), and her novels China Men (1980) and Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book. Chinese-American author Ha Jin in 1999 won the National Book Award for his second novel, Waiting, about a Chinese soldier in the Revolutionary Army who has to wait 18 years to divorce his wife for another woman, all the while having to worry about
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persecution for his protracted affair, and twice won the PEN/Faulkner Award, in 2000 for Waiting and in 2005 for War Trash. o Indian-American author Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her debut collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), and went on to write a well-received novel, The Namesake (2003), which was shortly adapted to film in 2007. In her second collection of stories, Unaccustomed Earth, released to widespread commercial and critical success, Lahiri shifts focus and treats the experiences of the second and third generation. o Other notable Asian-American (but not immigrant) novelists

include Amy Tan, best known for her novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989), tracing the lives of four immigrant families brought together by the game of Mahjong, and Korean American novelist Chang-Rae Lee, who has published Native as Marilyn Speaker, A Gesture Life, and Aloft. Such poets

Chin and Li-Young

Lee, Kimiko

Hahn and Janice

Mirikitani have also achieved prominence, as has playwright David Henry Hwang. Equally important has been the effort to recover earlier Asian American authors, started by Frank Chin and his colleagues; this effort has brought Sui Sin Far, Toshio Mori, Carlos Bulosan, John Okada, Hisaye Yamamoto and others to prominence. o Latina/o literature also became important during this period, starting with acclaimed novels by Toms Rivera (...y no se lo trag la tierra) and Rudolfo Anaya (Bless Me, Ultima), and the emergence of Chicano theater with Luis Valdez and Teatro Campesino. Latina writing became
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important thanks to authors such as Sandra Cisneros, an icon of an emerging Chicano literature whose 1984 bildungsroman (German for
a "novel of formation/ education/ culture/ coming-of-age story". It is a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of

the protagonist from youth to adulthood, and in which, therefore, character change is extremely important.) The House on Mango Street is taught in

schools across the United States, Denise Chavez's The Last of the Menu Girls and Gloria Anzalda's Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza. o Dominican-American author Junot Daz, received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his 2007 novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which tells the story of an overweight Dominican boy growing up as a social outcast in Paterson, New Jersey. Another Dominican

author, Julia Alvarez, is well known for How the Garca Girls Lost Their Accents and In the Time of the Butterflies. Cuban

American author Oscar Hijuelos won a Pulitzer for The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, and Cristina Garca received acclaim for Dreaming in Cuban. Well known Puerto Rican authors from this period include novelist Nicholasa Mohr, playwright Jos Rivera, poet Judith Ortiz Cofer, and the Nuyorican Poets Caf. o Spurred by the success of N. Scott Momaday's Pulitzer Prize winning House Made of Dawn, Native American literature showed explosive growth during this period, known as the Native American Renaissance, through such novelists as Leslie Marmon

Silko (e.g., Ceremony), Gerald Vizenor (e.g., Bearheart: The Heirship

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Chronicles and numerous essays on Native American literature), Louise Erdrich (Love Medicine and several other novels that use a recurring set of characters and locations in the manner of William Faulkner), James Welch (e.g., Winter in the Blood), Sherman Alexie (e.g., The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven), and poets Simon Ortiz and Joy Harjo. The success of these authors has brought renewed attention to earlier generations, including Zitkala-Sa, John Joseph Mathews, D'Arcy McNickle and Mourning Dove. o More recently, Arab American literature, largely unnoticed since the New York Pen League of the 1920s, has become more prominent through the work of Diana Abu-Jaber, whose novels include Arabian Jazz and Crescent and the memoir The Language of Baklava. Other important authors include Etel Adnan and poet Naomi Shihab Nye.

Harlem Renaissance o Writers in the Harlem Renaissance represent a flourishing of AfricanAmerican authors in a cultural movement that also included music and art o These writers had two goals to write about the African-American experience to create a body of literature by African-American authors that could rival anything written by anyone else

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o Harlem Renaissance writers included, among others: Langston Hughes (poetry) Zora Neale Hurston (fiction) Claude McKay (poetry) Countee Cullen (poetry) Arna Bontemps (poetry) Helene Johnson (poetry) James Weldon Johnson (poetry)

Jewish American literature o Jewish American Literature holds an essential place in the literary history of the United States. It encompasses traditions of writing in English, primarily, as well as in other languages, the most important of which has been Yiddish. While critics and authors generally

acknowledge the notion of a distinctive corpus and practice of writing about Jewishness in America, many writers resist being pigeonholed as 'Jewish voices'. Also, many nominally Jewish writers cannot be considered representative of Jewish American literature, one example being Isaac Asimov. o Beginning with the memoirs and petitions composed by the Sephardic immigrants who arrived in America during the mid 17th century, Jewish

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American writing grew over the subsequent centuries to flourish in other genres as well, including fiction, poetry, and drama. o More recent authors like Nicole Krauss, Paul Auster, Michael

Chabon, Jonathan Safran Foer and Art Spiegelman use their works to examine dilemmas of identity in their work, turning their attention especially to the Holocaust and the trends of both ongoing

assimilation and cultural rediscovery exhibited by younger generations of American Jews. Arguably the most influential of all American- Jewish novels was Leon Uris' 'Exodus'. Its story of the struggle to create the modern state of Israel translated into Russian became the inspiration for hundreds of thousands of Russian immigrants to Israel. Modern Jewish American novels often contain (a few or many) Jewish characters and address issues and themes of importance to Jewish American society such as assimilation, Zionism/Israel, and antisemitism, along with the recent phenomenon known as "New antisemitism." Two JewishAmerican writers have won the Nobel Prize, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Saul Bellow. Magazines such as The New Yorker have proved to be instrumental in exposing many Jewish American writers to a wider reading public. o Stereotypes of Jews in literature Although Jewish stereotypes first appeared in works by nonJewish writers, after World War II it was often Jewish American writers themselves who evoked such fixed images. The prevalence of antisemitic stereotypes in the works of such authors
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has sometimes been interpreted an expression of self-hatred; however, Jewish American authors have also used these negative stereotypes in order to refute them. However American- Jewish literature has also strongly celebrated American life. It has been primarily more an American than a Jewish literature. Perhaps the preeminent example of this is the great breakthrough novel of Saul Bellow 'Augie March'. According to Sanford V. Sternlicht, the first generation of Jewish-American authors presented "realistic portrayals - warts and all" of Jewish immigrants. In contrast, some second or thirdgeneration Jewish-American authors deliberately "reinforced negative stereotypes with satire and a selective realism". o Main themes Capitalism Assimilation Antisemitism

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