Literature

Literature American Literature: Prose, fiction and nonfiction of the American colonies and the United States, written in the English language from about 1600 to the present. This literature captures America’s quest to understand and define itself. For its first 200 years American prose reflected the settlement and growth of the American colonies, largely through histories, religious writings, and expedition and travel narratives. Fiction appeared only after the colonies gained independence, when the clamor for a uniquely American literature brought forth novels based on events in America’s past. With a flowering of prose in the mid-1800s, the young nation found its own voice. By then fiction had become the dominant literary genre in America. In the early 1800s America faced a difficult challenge: how to create its own culture. Calls for an American literature began during the Revolution and became more frequent and urgent as independence was assured. Over the course of the 19th century the country progressed from an agricultural economy concentrated on the Eastern seaboard to an industrialized nation that spanned the continent. With the dramatic changes in the nation came dramatic changes in its literature. When the century opened, only a handful of novels had been written, but by mid-century American american, first, fiction, poetry, century, literature, war, novel, new, poems, black, after, about, wrote, one, early, 19th, works, plays, novels, life, african, tales, published, poets, form, during, civil, british, young, writing, whitman, transcendentalist, stories