http://www.historyofamericanliteraturestore.info History Of American Literature Mon, 02 Jun 2008 10:50:00 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en By Kathryn VanSpanckeren Two major literary currents in 19th-century America merged in Mark Twain: popular frontier humor and local color, or "regionalism." These related literary approaches began in the 1830s -- and had even earlier roots in local oral traditions. In ragged frontier villages, on riverboats, in mining camps, ... http://www.historyofamericanliteraturestore.info/frontier-humor-and-realism/ By Kathryn VanSpanckeren Samuel Clemens, better known by his pen name of Mark Twain, grew up in the Mississippi River frontier town of Hannibal, Missouri. Ernest Hemingway's famous statement that all of American literature comes from one great book, Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, indicates this author's towering place ... http://www.historyofamericanliteraturestore.info/samuel-clemens-mark-twain-1835-1910/ By Kathryn VanSpanckeren The U.S. Civil War (1861-1865) between the industrial North and the agricultural, slave-owning South was a watershed in American history. The innocent optimism of the young democratic nation gave way, after the war, to a period of exhaustion. American idealism remained but was rechanneled. Before the ... http://www.historyofamericanliteraturestore.info/the-rise-of-realism-1860-1914/ By Kathryn VanSpanckeren American women endured many inequalities in the 19th century: They were denied the vote, barred from professional schools and most higher education, forbidden to speak in public and even attend public conventions, and unable to own property. Despite these obstacles, a strong women's network sprang up. ... http://www.historyofamericanliteraturestore.info/women-writers-and-reformers/ By Kathryn VanSpanckeren The Romance form is dark and forbidding, indicating how difficult it is to create an identity without a stable society. Most of the Romantic heroes die in the end: All the sailors except Ishmael are drowned in Moby-Dick, and the sensitive but sinful minister Arthur Dimmesdale ... http://www.historyofamericanliteraturestore.info/the-romance/ By Kathryn VanSpanckeren Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, and the Transcendentalists represent the first great literary generation produced in the United States. In the case of the novelists, the Romantic vision tended to express itself in the form Hawthorne called the "Romance," a ... http://www.historyofamericanliteraturestore.info/the-romantic-period-1820-1860-fiction/ By Kathryn VanSpanckeren New England sparkled with intellectual energy in the years before the Civil War. Some of the stars that shine more brightly today than the famous constellation of Brahmins were dimmed by poverty or accidents of gender or race in their own time. Modern readers increasingly value ... http://www.historyofamericanliteraturestore.info/two-reformers/