OPPapers.com

Early American Literature

As the new world struggled to gain impendence from its mother country, Britain, native authors also try to develop their own style of writings. It quickly became evident that the search for a native literature became a national obsession. Then with the triumph of American independence, many at the time saw this as a divine sign that America and her people were destined for greatness. Greatness came with a strong nation and thousands of poems and stories that still shape our nation. The recent revolution greatly expressed the heart of the American people. However, it would take another fifty years of development throughout American before it produced the first great generation of American writers such as, Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson, just to name a few.
There was a sense of enlightenment that spread over America in the 18th century.
Many of the stories reflected the sense of freedom that came with the revolution. Consider Washington Irving, he was among the first American writers who gained an international reputation by writing short stories. Irving had a special talent for creating a magical, fairytale quality in his tales, notably, "Rip Van Winkle" and thus helped shape the folklore of early America. "Rip Van Winkle" demonstrating the struggle that man had in order to be truly free, rather nationally or individually. His elegant writing style, full of gentle humor and vivid descriptions, became the building block for other writers to come. Around the same time as Irving's "Rip Van Winkle", William Cullen Bryant's "Thanatopsis displayed a pantheistic view of nature as imbued by God" (7th ed, p, 476). Bryant, just as Irving, saw the American landscape as an all-inspiring motivation for many of his stories. "Bryant's poetry focused on nature as a metaphor for truth established a central pattern in the American literary tradition" (William)....