Five Main Literary Movements in American HistoryI. Transcendent

Main Literary Movements in American History
    Good morning, everyone. Today’s lecture is the very first of a series of lectures on the main literary movements in United States history. In this class, we are going to cover five different movements in literature and discuss the origins and common beliefs of each movement. In this, our first class, I’d like to take some time to give you an overview of these five movements as a starting point. I’ll go over the period of time each movement covers, the place in the US where it got its start, the key figures in each movement, and the core beliefs of each.
    We won’t have time in the course to cover all literary movements, so we’re going to be focusing on the general time period of the 19th and 20th centuries. More specifically, this course will cover most of the important literary movements from 1830 to around 1940.
    The first literary movement we’ll be looking at in detail is called Transcendentalism. The reason we choose this as our starting point is that writers of this movement or period are the first to show a clear difference from British writers and British cultural tradition and heritage. Before this time, American writers and British writers shared similar views of the world and saw the world through the same lens. We sometimes refer to Transcendentalism as American Transcendentalism to differentiate it from an earlier philosophical movement in Europe. American Transcendentalism was born in New England, the north-eastern part of the United States around the 1830s. Writers in this movement believed, in very general terms, that nature, God, and the individual human were united, were the same, and that individuals did not need organized religion. American Transcendentalists also extolled individualism and encouraged individuals to be reliant on themselves and their development as human beings. Transcendentalists very often were active in social movements. Arguably the most important figure of this movement was Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose book called Nature, published in 1836, remains one of the movements most read works.
    The second movement we’re going to talk about is Romanticism, though it is more a series of movements in art, music and literature which lasted about 50 years and spread from Britain and Germany to other parts of the world. Basically, romanticism is centered on strong emotions and imagination rather than rational thought, and there is an emphasis in American Romanticism to focus on the supernatural and on human psychology. Many works in this genre tell stories full of strong emotion, unexplained phenomenon, and unusual occurrences. One of the most well known writers considered to be a Romantic writer is Edgar Allen Poe, who is known for his stories filled with mystery and who wrote many works we might now call psychological thrillers or horror stories. Poe thought that the human mind and imagination are factors in how we define reality.
    Our next movement is Realism, a movement which started in France in the mid 19th century before spreading to other areas, including the United States in the 1870s. This movement was, in many ways, a reaction to Romanticism in that it rejected strange and, indeed, romantic tales and aimed to show society and humanity as it was in real life. Realists focused on events that were ordinary, usual and typical rather than extraordinary or exotic. Many writers of this movement were also involved with social change, and writing about real conditions of real people was seen as one way to educate the general public for the need for change. One of this movement’s most easily recognizable names is Mark Twain, whose most famous stories were about everyday life in the American south, that is, the south eastern states of the US, and who worked throughout his life on a variety of social issues including ending slavery and giving workers more rights.
    Naturalism is an offshoot of Realism, and also had its roots in France. Both movements focused on the reality of everyday ordinary life, but Naturalism focused on how the outside world, that is, a person’s environment, influences and, perhaps, determines that person’s behavior. Naturalism generally believes that a person has a destiny or fate, and that person can do little to change that destiny or fate. Many writers in this movement focused on problems in society, like poverty. One of the movement’s most famous writers, Jack London, wrote books which compared animal behavior to human behavior, showing that human behavior is not all that different from animal behavior in extreme circumstances.
    The next movement we are going to look at is Modernism, which, of course, stretches beyond literature into music and art. The movement itself started in Europe in the late 19th century, as with many of the other movements, spread to America shortly after. The tumultuous period ending in World War I and World War II were seen by many as proof that the modern world was horrific and chaotic, and the end of World War II was seen as the start of a new era of humanity, either for good or for bad. Modernism reflects these thoughts, and writers in the Modernist era were looking, generally, to look beyond the old, the traditional, and were trying to find meaning in a new world. If we have to choose one word to describe this movement, we would probably choose the word "progress". Modernists were concerned with finding out what doesn’t work in the world and replacing it with what does. One major figure of the American branch of Modernism was Ezra Pound, who, among other things, revolutionized poetry.
    OK. In today’s lecture, we’ve had a brief look at the origins and common beliefs of the five different movements in American literature. In our next lecture, we will discuss each movement in detail.